


in the ruins of our worlds

by made_of_sunshine



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Archaeology, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Conspiracy, Embedded Images, Espionage, Identity Issues, M/M, Misunderstandings, Outer Space, Science, Science Fiction, Suspense, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 56,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23733397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/made_of_sunshine/pseuds/made_of_sunshine
Summary: Running from a brewing scandal on earth, Steve Rogers agrees to join an old friend on a mission investigating the abandoned ruins on an alien planet. Trouble is, he's not the only one on the Valkyrie with secrets.Featuring: a clueless protagonist, a growing mystery about the reclusive pilot on board, and an investigation into the remnants of various alien civilizations
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 114
Kudos: 77





	1. Preflight

**Author's Note:**

> This AU has been in the works since... last October? Chapter updates will be every 4-5 days.  
> 

The hangar’s busier than Steve’s used to.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, really. He _has_ spent over two years working in – and against - the higher echelons of the government, getting used to the odd attempt at a bribe in the form of a privately chartered plane. But not today. And not for the foreseeable future, unless this mission is a lot shorter than he’s been led to believe.

Truth be told, he’s actually looking forward to it. There’s a relief of sort, in the same kind of crowd he had lived in growing up, and had gotten used to again while on loan to army from SHIELD, the kind of barely restrained chaos the day just before starting a rotation.

He pushes his way through the masses, half dodging around carts laden with supplies and ground crew making last minute checks, around platoons of marching soldiers and greasy mechanics and inspectors with their faces buried in screens. There are so many _people_. He breathes in the scent of sweat, of oil and the traces of exhaust, and that bitter, sharp metallic tang that he’s come to associate with spacecraft. In all the hustle, this is his first glimpse of the Valkyrie: half formed, hidden by the billowing mist of the steam vents, edges and curves of shadowy grey metal with the dark gleam of tinted glass.

It’s beautiful.

Steve shoulders his pack and pushes forward.

* * *

_Extract from the Foster Papers_

_Expedition 0616_

_Location: Jotunheim, 33.89° S, 151.19° E_

_Most of Jotunheim appears to be a barren wasteland of ice. If civilization ever did exist here – which radio signals currently travelling though the Orion arm of the galaxy do indicate – no observable native structures remain. Analysis of the ice reveals components similar to those found in modern explosives distributed consistently across the planet’s surface, along with evidence of a massive upheaval in the range of 10,000-15,000 years ago. A prevailing theory is that the indigenous civilization fell victim to a global attack from external sources._

_The most conclusive evidence of this is the Asgardian._

_The Asgardian stands at the location where geologists calculate to be the epicenter of Jotunheim’s cataclysm. The structure is 11 feet tall and discernibly humanoid. At a molecular level, the material of the statue seems to have been manipulated in order to make it impervious to erosion and other damage (refer to Section 5.8 for chemical analysis)._

_It appears to have a discernible head, two arms, and two legs. In addition, a disputed fifth appendage seems to emanate from the shoulders, though it lacks the solid definition afforded to the other limbs. The arms and upper legs are distinctly patterned with scales. It is difficult to discern if the figure is intended to be wearing clothing, if any, due to a lack of knowledge of the underlying physiology. However, the academic consensus is that the figure is intended to be wearing protective footwear._

_The most striking feature of the Asgardian is widely recognized to be its face. With a physiology eerily similar to that of humans - barring the vein like structures emanating from the eyes - it appears to have a distinctly recognizable expression. Various critics have described it to be arrogant, imperious and scornful. It is uncertain how much of this is intentional versus a product the natural human tendency towards anthropomorphization._

_A line of glyphs circle the slightly raised base the figure stands on. No translation for the text exists._

* * *

Tony meets him just as he’s about to board. He looks like a disheveled, exhausted mess, but knowing him that’s just normal. In this case, planning a half-crazed journey through space to visit known habitable planets just before their sanctioned terraformations might just do that to anyone.

Steve stops himself from smiling when he spots him, raising an eyebrow. “A welcoming party? That’s not like you.”

Tony grins, a flash of white in his oil-streaked face. “Nah, I was actually out to check on the engines. Not much time before we launch. But it’s good to see you, Cap – excited for another trip into the unknown?”

Steve grimaces. “Perhaps. I’d like it better without Central up my ass.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Tony says, a slightly ironic twist to his mouth. “Say, while I’m here – do you want a tour, maybe a little meet n’ greet with the crew? The engines can wait. Plus, it wouldn’t hurt for the brass to think I’m making an attempt at the whole team player thing.”

Steve pulls his pack up from where it’s been slipping off his shoulders, amused almost despite himself. It’s good to see Tony again. “Lead the way.”

The Valkyrie is undoubtedly impressive. Steve knows that the intended crew size is supposed to be eight people, but it could comfortably house three times that. It’s a sleek, streamlined vessel, every piece gleaming, top-notch Stark technology with three livable levels and cutting edge hyperengines. He can almost smell the new paint on the hull.

Tony leads him through the loading bay to the ground vessels and escape pods, and then to the stores, where Steve sees a hulking blond figure in the shadowed distance heaving boxes from a trolley onto the shelves.

“That’s our maintenance guy,” Tony says, sparing him a distracted glance. “You can meet him later; he’s not much one for talking.”

“Alright,” Steve replies, and they move up to the next level, much more designed for human habitation. Steve has to squeeze his pack tighter to his chest so that it can fit into the ladder chute, Tony not bothering to pause with his usual incomprehensible science talk. He leads him past the entrance to the engines, to a sliding grass screen labeled CREW QUARTERS. The screen leads to a hallway with a series of closed doors at regular intervals along the left. On the right, an open door leads into a large room where Steve sees a screen up on a wall, a large circular table fixed to the floor with launch chairs to match, and what seems to be – in line with what Steve’s used to of Tony’s style – _bean bags_ strewn around the rest of the room.

“Aren’t those a safety hazard?” Steve asks.

“Eh, live a little.” Tony replies. “I’m not sure who’s bunking with whom actually - The labs, medical suite and gym are further along this level, everyone else is probably busy there – except for, yes, how could I forget, the bridge.”

Steve follows along as Tony leads the way to the next level. “So Dr. Foster’s already here?”

For the first time, Tony stops, almost causing Steve to bump into him halfway up the next ladder. “Oh yes she’s here,” he says, sounding as smug as Steve’s ever heard him. “Thank all the stars and planets. You’re actually the last to reach apart from the linguist, there was some trouble with the paperwork for that one. Tell me, did you see how much of a fuss Central made when the news that Foster was joining this little expedition leaked?”

Steve sighs. “Couldn’t miss it if I tried.”

Jane Foster was the world’s leading expert on xenoarchaeology and astrophysics. She was also the first – and only – civilian recipient of the telomere technology that allowed the government to lengthen the lives of those it saw fit. She had been working on tracking alien civilizations for over thirty years, and still didn’t look older than the day she had received the serum.

It had all happened during the time Steve was in the army, but he had had enough time to get intimately acquainted with the details while he was fighting against the unfair restrictions of the process –among the many other injustices that Central allowed - alongside Peggy in the last two years. To be fair, the serum technology had been more Peggy’s department, but he had pulled enough all-nighters beside her to have a fair idea of what had been going on.

Steve knows that he shouldn’t have believed that they both could keep one-upping the system without being caught forever, but the loss still stings. They had managed to make so much progress. They had made a good team. They had made a good –everything.

Thinking about Peggy still hurts, in the dull, constant way of a bruise that has only just started to heal. He thinks of the last time he saw her – she was having lunch with someone else, and he had come to the same restaurant that they used to by sheer force of habit, and the moment he had seen her perfectly done hair, his heart had dropped a beat. But the _real_ last time he had seen her – their apartment in New Brooklyn, his clothes strewn on the floor, the slight click of her lipstick as she opened it , the soft sadness in what both of them knew would be their last kiss.

Thinking about that hurt a lot.

Tony pulls Steve out of his funk by letting go of the ladder to pump his fist and nearly falling onto him. It’s enough of a distraction that by the time they reach the bridge, Steve’s fully in the present again.

The bridge is smaller than the army-class carriers that Steve’s used to, and also probably a few decades ahead, no doubt courtesy of Stark. He’s not sure he could fly it himself, and his license is barely three years old. A couple of guys are playing cards at the holo-table. The one with his back to Steve and Tony doesn’t shift as they enter, but the other player looks up and breaks into a grin.

“Yo, Cap!” Sam Wilson says, and Steve feels the knot of tension in his chest slightly loosen, feels his mouth stretch into an answering smile. If Sam’s here, a long voyage trapped in a tin can just got a whole lot more bearable.

“Sam!” He grins. “I had no idea you’d be here.” He holds his hand out, and Sam answers with a solid handshake. “It’s good to see you.”

“On loan to the private sector actually”, Sam says. “Central needed a military guy to head this mission before they could sign off on it, and I volunteered.”

Steve raises his eyebrows, breaking that statement down for what it actually is. It’s not usually the norm for Central to be so thoroughly invested in a private venture to the extent of sending someone on it, even if this particular mission is sponsored by the same person who has come closest to ruining their monopoly on green energy.

But, Steve thinks, would they still be uninterested if said mission is then joined by the same man who had successfully blocked all their recent authoritarian moves? It may look like a conspiracy, he concedes. Never mind that they have zero power in the far reaches of space. Steve knows, intimately, what he and Tony can get up to together. The Sokovian world was enough evidence of that.

“So, what - head this mission? You’re the captain?”

Sam clicks his teeth together. “Yep. And this guy here is our pilot.” He motions towards the second player at the table, who still hasn’t really moved, except maybe to hunch over his cards even more. “James Barnes.”

Steve spares a glance for the guy. His face is mostly hidden by brown hair that is definitely against military regulation. In the short second of scrutiny, he tenses and gives a jerky nod without ever looking up.

Steve gives a distracted hum in response and focuses back on Sam and Tony. “Just so we’re on same page here. How closely is Central going to stay involved in this _research_ expedition?”

Sam sucks in a breath, his expression going blank, and Tony lets out a short laugh.

“Let me put it this way,” Tony says. “They’re playing ball blindfolded. Capisce?”

Steve nods. He knows he and Tony are in eerily similar situations here. Both of them are running, in one way or another. And now Sam’s been sent by the people after them.

But that was their mistake. Sam volunteered, and Steve bets that no one in Central bothered to find out why. That’s their problem. They never account for free will – for human connection. And since Steve’s record is sealed by SHIELD, there’s no evidence of the time he and Sam spent serving together.

He has no doubt that Sam signed up for this to protect him.

“Well,” Tony says, into the tense silence. “I think that concludes my hostly duties.” He claps Steve on the back and jerks his head at Wilson. “Captain, permission to get back to working on the engines? Oh, and I don’t remember which bunks are empty, can you show Rogers?”

“Sure,” Wilson says, rolling his eyes slightly. “I’ll show Steve to his bunk.”

Tony gives a sarcastic half-salute and leaves while Sam ushers Steve to the passageway leading to the crew quarters.

“Sam – “ Steve starts.

“Don’t,” Sam says.

Steve’s able to stay quiet for a minute. “ Just – Thank you.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Cap,” he says. “I got tired of being a dancing monkey for them, same as you. This was a way to get out.”

Steve holds back a smile. “Still,” he. says. “I’m not going to forget this.”

Sam huffs out a breath in return, giving up. He points towards the second last door running along the passage. “That one’s yours. You’ve got me, then Romanoff to your left, and Barnes to your right.”

Steve nods his thanks and pulls open the door. It’s a tiny room, barely a cubby hole with a twin bed and a double locker. There’s a table that folds down from the wall above the bed.

He likes it already.

Putting his pack down, he turns back to Sam. “Can I look around the rest of the ship before takeoff?”

“Sure, man. I’ll get back to the bridge. Barnes is a fucking cheat at cards.”

Steve laughs.

* * *

Takeoff is five hours later.

Sam’s voice comes from the bridge, telling all passengers to buckle down. In the interim, Steve’s met Wanda, an independent researcher from the European colonies with an expertise in nonhuman architecture, and briefly been introduced to Dr. Foster, though he’s not sure she even noticed him when Wanda brought him into the room. He didn’t take offence – Tony’s done much worse to him in the time they’ve known each other.

They all gather in the large room opposite their individual quarters and strap themselves down around the table. Romanoff – the linguist –who had arrived in the nick of time, introduces herself and buckles herself in with the same practiced ease that Steve does. It’s just the five of them – Tony, Romanoff, Foster, Wanda and Steve. Sam and Barnes are on the bridge coordinating with ground control. Steve looks around. “Where’s the other one – the maintenance guy you were talking about?”

“He’s using the launch seats in the loading bay,” Tony says absently. He fiddles with something on the table and a hologram pops up – a scale model of the Valkyrie. “So,” he says. “Ready to leave good old Earth, folks?”

Sam’s voice comes over the intercom, starting the countdown.

_10…_

Romanoff shrugs, a wry smile touching her lips, her eyes on the speakers lining the room. “I’m not sure I have much choice anymore at this point.”

_5…_

The faint rumbling of the engine becomes a steady, rattling roar, and Steve starts to laugh, his mouth opening to shape a response -

_1.._

Then the countdown hits zero and he’s suddenly thrown back into his seat , the G-forces pressing him down, crushing him. He feels his ears pop, and faintly makes out the sound of someone else in the room groaning as they’re jostled back and forth, the vibration shaking his teeth in his skull.

On the holoscreen, the altitude numbers flicker higher and higher, the acceleration stretching out for an eternity, the pressure almost crushing him, until final, _finally_ they level out, the roar of the engines dimming slightly, taking on a unearthly pitch that Steve remembers all too well.

Sam’s voice cuts in on the intercom again, warmth suffusing his words. “That’s the hard part done, folks. We’re past the atmosphere. Preparing for jump.”

There’s a crackle, and Sam’s voice is replaced by another soft, scratchy one. Unthinkingly, Steve jerks towards it, held back by the X-shaped straps across his chest.

“Standby,” the voice says. “Hyperspace jump in three, two, one –“

There’s a violent lurch and a nauseous sense of being folded inside out. Steve feels like he’s being squeezed and stretched simultaneously, like he’s at the edge of a giant whirlpool being dragged inevitably further in. Then the rattling of the engines suddenly cuts out, replaced by a low hum as the ship evens out into a smooth glide. He looks at the display, and the altitude numbers have disappeared. They’re nowhere now.

They’ve made the jump.

They’re in hyperspace.

* * *

The way Steve remembers it, he joined SHIELD because he wanted to see justice done. But in the years after he realized that was a lie, in the days when he still used to have nightmares every other night, when he dragged himself to class because he _had goddamn earned_ his scholarship if nothing else, something caught his eye.

It was a video in one of his classes, the soft spoken professor struggling to load it onto the holo-screen. A woman, alone on a planet, standing among the ruins of an alien temple. She walked through the crumbling structure, pointing out a carving that represented learning, the place where people gathered for prayer, the wall that had been torn down by an attack. At the time of its discovery the planet, called Hala, was hailed as conclusive proof that humans were not alone.

But there was no one left. Whoever had lived on Hala was long dead. And years later, Hala was followed by Sakaar, and then Jotunheim and then the Sokovian world. And still, they found no one.

All that was left were ruins. The empty spaces in which humanity could have found a friend. 

When the government found out that no further utility could be gained from the planets, they decided to put in motion plans to convert them into new homes for the elites - an escape from the polluted dregs of earth – or mine them for minerals.

Steve had watched the video, and wondered.

On the Valkyrie, he flips through his sketchbook and sees his drawings of the Asgardian, of the ruins of the Temples at Sakaar, of the carvings from excavations at Hala.

Just 10,000 years away. Barely a second in galactic time. Barely an instant before humans were able to reach them, talk to them, before they were gone.

_We just missed you._

He thinks of the Asgardian, the self-assured arrogance in its stance, the savage light in its eyes. The uninhabitable wasteland of the planet left behind.

Maybe its good that they did.

* * *

(excerpt from Tony Stark's preflight notes)


	2. Sakaar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This AU is borrows several plot points from a sci-fi novel involving xenoarchaeology that's a personal favorite. This particular chapter does provide a pretty big hint as to which book, so kudos to anyone who's able to guess after reading it!

The view into hyperspace has always been one of Steve’s favorite things.

It’s is like looking at the streetlights through the fogged up windows of a taxi at night, half-dreaming - a gently pulsating orange-pink mist in which, if he focuses very hard, Steve can see shadows of galaxies, like ripples beneath the surface, except the moment he consciously notices them they fade into nothing, replaced by the afterimage of a supernova so big that it covers the sky.

He’s spent hours and hours on the flight trying to sketch it out already.

At some point, Wanda wanders over to sit beside him, working on her readings in companionable silence. He works on his drawing of the view outside for what seems an eternity before the harsh ringing of a bell distracts them both.

Steve blinks, his hand pausing above the page. “What’s that?”

“Lunchtime,” Wanda sighs, stretching out her wrists. “Stark wanted us all to eat together. You coming?”

Another of Stark’s unsubtle attempt to force team bonding. As if he hadn’t had enough of the last time.

He shakes his head exasperatedly but gets up and follows her, leaving his sketchbook on the table, and when Wanda catches sight of the sketch, her expression turns surprised. “I didn’t know that you drew.”

He gives a self-deprecating shrug, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yeah, well. It’s a hobby.”

She gives a soft laugh, opening the door to the common room. “It’s nice that you’ve been able to keep it up.”

When they enter the common room, Steve spots Sam and Barnes hunched over the food locker, pulling our silvery foil packets of dried rations. He wrinkles his nose at the sight of them, suddenly hit by the memory of their horrible sawdust taste, and the inevitable truth that it’s all he’ll be having for the foreseeable future. Joy.

Tony bounces into the room behind him, closely followed by Romanoff and Dr. Foster, both in deep conversation about the translations of some of the newly excavated inscriptions at Hala.

That’s everyone except for the reclusive mechanic. He takes a seat at the table with the rest of the newcomers and Sam saunters over, a packet in each hand, one of which Tony immediately grabs for.

“Watch it Stark. These are getting served in order of number of PhDs only.”

“Low blow, Wilson,” Tony says, grinning in the direction of Dr. Foster. “But you’re still after me.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Sam replies. He hands the first to Foster with a dramatic half bow, and throws the other packet to Romanoff across the table – “Natasha, please,” she smiles, catching it – before turning back to Barnes, who throws him two more from over by the food locker. “And _this_ one is for you, Tony, followed by Maximoff.”

Tony catches sight of the label on his food packet and groans. “Chlorophyll flavored? Really?”

Sam shoots him a shit-eating grin. “Packet for Rogers, please!” he calls out, and catches the next one from Barnes deftly, juggling it over to Steve. Steve looks down at it, and raises his eyebrows. Apple. Well, he thinks, it _is_ his favorite.

They settle down to eat.

* * *

_The Layman’s Guide to the Galaxy, page 141_

_Section: He to Hy_

_Hyperspace_

_Imagine you are standing next to one end of a piece of cardboard laid out on the floor that’s eight feet long. The other end of the cardboard is marked X. One way to reach the X is to step onto the cardboard and walk eight feet towards it. The other way is to fold the cardboard over so that you are now next to the X, and simply step onto the cardboard. You now have to travel one layer down through the cardboard – easily doable with ta box cutter - as opposed to eight feet forward to reach the X._

_This, essentially, is how hyperspace works._

_Hyperspace engines fold 3 dimensional space in the fifth dimension (the fourth dimension being time). This does not affect real space in any way. However, 3D space is finitely compressible given a certain amount of power. As an analogy, even after folding the piece of cardboard, you still have to move through the thickness of the material from the top layer to the bottom layer to reach the X. So, while travelling through hyperspace can reduce the time spent in interstellar voyages by a considerable factor, journeys still tend to last several days (aka the amount of time it takes to travel between layers). At the same time, the further the destination, the more accuracy with which interstellar pilots can determine their exit points from hyperspace (i.e., you can fold a big piece of cardboard so that the point A and point B align much more easily than folding a small piece of cardboard, where you’ll no doubt end up with the edges wildly misaligned)._

_The tradeoff in hyperspace travel is essentially power versus accuracy. The further the destination, the more three-dimensional space has to be folded to reach it, taking up more power – and thus precious fuel - with each light year. On the other hand, aim for the moon from earth in a hyperspace craft, and you might just end up outside the solar system._

* * *

Later, Steve settles back by the windows, reluctantly putting his sketches aside for the briefing packet that the scientists left on his bunk. This time, it’s Natasha who spots him, politely asking if he would mind going through the notes together.

“This is only my second time out in the field,” she admits, shrugging. “I’d appreciate pointers from someone with more experience.”

“Oh – yeah, sure.” Steve says distractedly, moving aside his papers to make space for her. “But this is actually only my second off-world mission too.”

She makes a surprised noise, tilting her head. “The Sokovian World …?”

“Beginner’s luck,” Steve admits ruefully. “And a lotta good guys around me who didn’t get half the credit they should have.”

She laughs. “If you’re talking about Stark, I think he already gets plenty of credit for that one.”

Steve thinks of Tony’s gaunt, emancipated face, of the pieces of the world falling from the twilit sky, of the blazing comet of Tony’s mad, brilliant idea to end it. He grimaces. That’s not true at all.

Natasha must notice the hardening of his expression, because she apologizes for overstepping. She opens her own file. After a moment, he joins her.

The briefing packet is about their first stop on this mission, detailing the specific areas of the ancient city on the desert planet of Sakaar that they’re going to work on. Sakaar was the second system humanity found with evidence of civilization after Hala, and from all appearances, a civilization at par with – if not more advanced than – humanity itself. The planet seemed to be a single giant city that stretched across almost the half of surface.

Today, it was the home of the beginning of the government’s long-term terraformation program. Algae-laced chunks of ice had been seeded at strategic points on the surface and in orbit around the planet starting a year ago, and in eight days they would be detonated, subjecting the planet to a year-long storm. Within five years, the algae would have raised oxygen levels and force-start a water cycle that would lower global temperatures to permanently habitable levels.

It was impressive, Steve had to admit.

But it was also going to be a colossal waste. Only the rich could afford to transfer over once Sakaar was ready, and they would take their wealth with them to their new paradise, leaving Earth a drained husk. This was just Central’s shiny new plan to distract people away from the massive problems on Earth.

And if, along the way they destroyed the only remnants of another civilization, well what could that matter anyway?

The city on Sakaar, though mostly irreversibly damaged from what seemed to be multiple attacks, invasions, and civil wars, was, was the most impressive structure Steve had ever seen - and he had visited the megadomes of Tokyo and Jakarta. The central tower had suffered the most damage from the attacks, later covered by approximately seven thousand years’ worth of sand, and was what they would be investigating in the short time they had.

A SHIELD sponsored group had supposedly found promising indicators on the upper levels before Central had ordered them out, and it was, Steve mused, frankly a miracle that Tony had managed to get permission to perform one last research foray so close to the deadline.

He and Natasha go over the data from the central tower. Steve focuses on the planning, bringing up SHIELD’s findings and using their reports to plot a potential course through the structure. The sand dunes on top of it are constantly shifting, is the problem. It’ll be difficult to set up a solid enough base from which to dig down – that is, unless –

Steve brings up the ship database on the holotable and sends in a query, checking for some equipment he remembers seeing in the inventory. Yes –there it is. They have a suction pump and a hydraulic winch in storage. Perfect.

He’s been at it for an hour when his comms chimes with an incoming message. He taps it twice, opening up the line.

“Is this Rogers?”

He blinks. “Yeah?” He doesn’t recognize the voice.

“D’you want the pump and crane prepped for when we reach?”

“Uhhh... yes, actually. Who’s this?”

The line abruptly cuts off with a sharp crackle. He pulls off his earpiece and stares at it in confusion.

Beside him, Natasha makes a face, underlining something in her notes. “That must have been the technician. I met him this morning near the loading bay.”

Steve shakes his head. “Fun guy.”

“He was very nice, actually,” she says, an odd note to her voice. “I got the impression he was lonely.”

“He has an interesting way of showing it.”

Natasha’s mouth twists to one side, but she doesn’t say a word.

Dinner that night is subdued, everyone having spent the day prepping for re-entry tomorrow. Steve goes to his bunk early, randomly doodling in his sketchbook for a while, recapping the day’s plans in his head, the course they’ll have to follow through the structure. By the time he’s finished, the outlines of a face are on the page – a stubbled jawline framed by choppy dark hair. The beginnings of a clefted chin.

He shakes his head and goes to sleep.

They exit hyperspace the next morning, half a day’s journey from the planet. Sam whoops into the intercom when they verify their location, the noise of him thumping Barnes on the back clearly audible through the comms. “Not bad, Barnes!”

Steve is impressed, despite himself. That level of accuracy after a jump to somewhere so close by speaks of years of experience. And it brings them unexpectedly closer to Sakaar.

Or, as Tony likes to call it, the garbage dump of the galaxy.

* * *

They have six days.

On day seven, at 0800 local time, Central will detonate the asteroids in orbit and seeded across the planet in a meticulously planned out chain reaction that will start the terraformation process. In the moments after detonation, a tsunami will sweep across the surface, annihilating every recognizable structure with extreme force.

Steve knows that they’re cutting it close.

On day one, he and Tony oversee one of Tony’s drilling bots tunnel into the sand dune above the tower. Steve puts on a protective suit and rappels down into the hole, flicking on his wrist screen. There’s a pocket of air in one of the upper levels of the temple that the drill has reached. If they can stabilize that today, moving further in will be easier.

The chamber is large, the ceilings vaguely vaulted. The camera on his suit makes faint clicking noises as Wanda and Dr. Foster manipulate it from the lab. A sagging door spilling sand is on the other end of the room and most of the walls are filed with faded murals. He moves closer to one, the image striking a chord from memory.

His fingers hover over the carving. The figure in the mural is recognizably Sakaarian.

Steve once heard someone describe the holographic reconstructions of Sakaarians as “creepy rock apes”, and it does get the image across: they have skin that can only be described as _craggy,_ with a vague, slightly unsettling stance that at first glance looks like they are hunched over forwards, but on looking closer their backs are actually highly curved _backwards,_ and that the eye like structures on the back-of-the-head that-looks-like-the-front are actually infrared sensing organs. It had taken ages for people to figure out why in every depiction Sakaarians had recorded themselves as facing _away_ from each other.

“Enough to get started?” Steve asks.

“Definitely,” Foster answers from the ship through the comms. “Wanda and I will be coming down soon; can you look for a way into the next room?”

And so it goes.

Days two to four are taken up by the search. Steve coordinates, occasionally going down himself, overseeing the expansion into ever-lower chambers and passageways. The lower levels are actually more structurally intact than the upper ones, which have taken the brunt of the sandstorms on the surface. Most of the time though, it’s Maximoff and Foster recording data, both of whom have greater technical expertise. When it comes to exploring underground structures on alien planets, the last time Steve had to do it, his objective had been quite different.

Admittedly, it’s a rush job. Natasha tells him that it’s lucky that they already have a rough idea of what certain words of the Sakaarian language mean, so that they know which pieces are more important than others. Six days is an insanely small time frame to glean all the secrets the temple hides, and all hands are on deck - even the elusive handyman takes the night shift, clearing out a surprising amount of area during the time everyone else is asleep.

He meets Tony once. The man’s been holed up in his lab, sorting through the data that’s being gathered. Steve hasn’t seen him once since they started digging. When Steve finds him, he spots an empty bottle of scotch hidden behind some boxes.

“Jesus, Tony.”

Tony’s eyes are bloodshot. Steve sighs and pulls a stool up so he can sit beside him.

“I should be able to go down there,” Tony mutters.

Steve stares down at the countertop. “I don’t think anyone here is expecting more than what you’ve already given,” he says, choosing his words carefully, trying to express his deep-set conviction in a way that Tony won’t find insulting.

“Easy for you to say.”

“Listen,” Steve says, an edge creeping into his voice. “I know being here isn’t your first choice. Frankly, it’s not mine either. But it’s better than being forcibly ousted from your company and losing control of the arc reactor. And I’m better off here where Peggy can follow through on her case without the scandal of me being there.”

Tony snorts. “Bet you loved that when she brought that up.”

Steve makes a face. “Yeah, I wasn’t happy about it. But you’re doing the right thing here. That’s important. Central doesn’t get to restrict the distribution of renewable energy sources, they don’t win against Peggy, and now they can’t erase the Sakaarians either.”

Tony makes a noncommittal noise.

“Tony,” Steve says seriously. “I need you to promise me you won’t spiral. Use the bridge terminal to call Pepper or Rhodey if you need to.”

“They have better things to –“

“They care about you. After Sokovia, I think they’ll be glad to know you’re okay.”

“God,” Tony mutters after a moment. “Do you have to be so earnest?”

Steve smiles. “It’s what I do. Get some rest.”

Tony rolls his eyes, but Steve can see a small smile tugging the corner of his mouth.

* * *

At the end of day five, everything changes.

Steve’s up in the labs with Natasha, monitoring the feeds from Wanda and Foster’s suit cameras, tracking their progress through the structure. According to the blueprints, they’re almost on the lowest level now.

Something on the feed changes. It takes a moment for Steve to make out what he’s seeing.

A towering figure carved into the walls. The recognizable power emitting from its stance. The odd, scaly pattern on the limbs.

Wanda’s voice crackles over the comms. “Is that – is that the _Asgardian_?”

Steve zooms in on Wanda’s feed, and watches as Foster’s tracker moves over to where Wanda is. The two feeds sync up, showing pictures of the same mural from slightly different angles.

It looks exactly like the statue on Jotunheim.

“Steve,” Foster says, carefully calm. “Can you perform an image analysis from the lab? The central figure in this carving, match it with the Asgardian on Jotunheim.”

“Copy,” Steve says, and inputs the commands on the terminal. While the results are loading, he examines the live feed from their cameras.

The mural is striking. The Asgardian appears to be seated on a large chair, faced by multiple Sakaarians. There’s no direct way to tell, but Steve’s looked at enough pictures of Sakaarians to see that the way they’re looking at the Asgardian isn’t friendly.

There’s been no previous record of the Sakaarians having any contact with extraterrestrial beings. There’s no record of them ever having travelled beyond their own planet at all.

God, if it really is the Asgardian – or at least, the same species - it could change – it could change everything.

The computer pings.

Steve takes a breath.

“Eighty eight percent match.”

He hears the scientist’s exclamations.

Beside him, Natasha raises her eyebrows. “Is that conclusive?”

Steve’s mouth twists. “For a cross reference with a 2D carving? Yeah, pretty much. It’s the same species. Dr. Foster – do you want to bring this mural up to the ship?”

“Yes,” she says dazedly. “No – wait. We need to see if there’s more. If they form a pattern somehow. Get the loading packages prepped, but don’t do anything right now.”

“Copy,” Steve says and mutes his comms. He sends out a general message to the rest of the ship letting them know what’s happened and gets an immediate ping back from Sam, asking him to keep him updated on the situation.

Natasha sits down on one of the lab stools and vaguely starts to spin. “We’re making history here,” she says interestedly.

Steve turns to her. “Yes. This is – this is huge. This is the first time we’ve seen evidence that the Sakaarians interacted with other alien races. And for it to be Asgardian? It’s game changing.”

“It is, isn’t it,” she muses. Her eyes meet his as she completes a spin. “You care about this a lot.”

“The Sakaarians were people too,” Steve says simply. “They don’t deserve the indignity of being forgotten.”

* * *

The entire ship is buzzing after the discovery of the Asgardian mural. They find one more which depicts the Asgardian in combat against the Sakaarians, before they hit a wall of solid sand.

They have one day left.

“Captain Wilson,” Dr. Foster says, after calling an emergency meeting in the early hours of day six. “I hate to ask this of you. But can you request planetary command for more time – even six hours could make all the difference. We need time to get through the blockage; there could be so much more on the lower levels.”

Sam looks dubious. “This is a private mission,” he tells her. He looks over at Stark, who’s almost visibly buzzing with nerves. “Stark’s deal was that he stays out of Central’s affairs while in space, and they stay out of his. We break that and everything’s on the table.”

“But they’re not _doing_ that aren’t they,” Tony bites out, almost viciously. Privately, Steve agrees. Central sending Sam was undoubtedly a dirty move, and one that would have succeeded if not for the guy himself. But the truth isn’t going to work in their favor, not when Central has all the power.

There’s an awkward silence for a few seconds.

“I’ll send in a request,” Sam says after a moment. He directs his gaze towards Dr. Foster, his expression serious. “Doc, I need you to cosign it, put all your academic weight behind this thing. The only way we get away with this unscathed is if they believe that you pressured me into sending them a message. And Stark – stay out of it.”

Both Foster and Tony nod, their expressions grim.

It’ll be a few hour until they get a response. They pull double shifts on getting through the wall of sand. Safety regulations forbid more than two people being onsite at a time, but they get a third person down to work at it – the technician, whose face Steve can’t make out from behind the protective gear, and who goes at the wall with a strength that’s almost inhuman.

At midday, they get a response.

The first Steve hears of it is a whooping through the comms, the sound of Sam and Foster cheering. He’s onsite at the lowest level when it happens, and stops his work on the drill, moving away from the suction pump. “What happened?”

“We got four more hours!” Jane yells excitedly. Steve winces at the feedback from the mike, but can’t help the thrill of excitement that runs through him. He glances over at Wanda and pumps a fist. She gives him an excited thumbs up in return. They should be through the blockage by nightfall; that gives them the full night to explore the lowest level.

“Why’d they agree?” he asks, curious.

“The head for this sector is a fan of our resident genius, apparently,” comes Natasha’s dry response. “Once they heard Foster was requesting it, they caved like marshmallow.”

“Well,” Steve says dryly. “Good for us.”

But things don’t go as much in their favor as they would have liked.

Instead of nightfall, it’s almost dawn by the time they break through the wall – it’s the biggest blockage they’ve encountered yet.

Detonation is in T-minus six hours.

They’re running out of time.

On the ship, Sam, Barnes, Natasha and Tony work on getting ready for liftoff. The handyman retreats to the storage rooms, making sure everything they’ve collected is safely packed. Steve, Wanda and Foster move their base of operations to the loading bay so that they can switch out more quickly.

Sam wants to keep an hour’s margin between their withdrawal from the site and detonation. Foster and Wanda suit up and drop down along the steel cable attached to the set up in the loading bay while Steve monitors them.

T-minus three hours.

Two more murals of the Asgardian. Again, both of the new ones showing the figure facing off against the Sakaarians, the first one oddly obscured by deliberately drawn wavy lines. In the second one, there are two of them, standing side by side, towering over the natives, an almost palpable hostility radiating between the two alien species.

T-minus two hours.

Foster and Wanda have reached a door that leads to the dungeons, according to Steve’s scans. It takes eighteen minutes for them to cut through the lock.

And then –

“Are those glyphs _Asgardian_?”

Steve zooms in on the feed, hearing Wanda’s accompanying exclamation of disbelief.

There’s no doubt about it. He recognizes the curving script from Jotunheim from hours spent staring at it, sketching it out, wondering what the only message left for humanity means.

In the dungeons of a temple on Sakaar, they’ve found Asgardian writing.

A rush of adrenaline floods through Steve. Maybe – maybe this means they will finally be able to translate the Jotunheim message.

There’s a sudden screeching through the comms, a harsh whine of feedback.

“Shit!” Wanda yells. “My suit’s breached, pull me up!”

Steve hits the lever instantly, watching the machine crank into motion, moving to check Wanda’s vitals. “What happened – what’s going on?”

Foster answers, “She tried to touch the glyphs, they’re coated with some sort of corrosive substance, it ate through her gear.”

“Foster, get back up here,” he says, tracking Wanda’s progress. All her life signs are steady, and though the air down there is incredibly dusty, it’s not actively harmful. They just have to hope whatever it is doesn’t reach her skin before she’s back in the ship.

“I won’t touch them –“ she starts.

“Listen to me,” he says. “Your suit’s not equipped for this.”

There’s a short silence. “Copy.”

He checks his watch.

One and a half hours to go.

He pings the handyman, asks him to bring the decontamination spray from the stores and then focuses back on the screen, tracking their progress.

The ten minutes it takes for both of them to be pulled up seems like an eternity. He doesn’t notice anyone come in, but the next time he looks up the decon canister has been deposited a few meters away. He quirks an eyebrow, but focuses back on the screen.

When Wanda finally reaches the ship, she’s coughing from her exposure to the dust. He sprays her down, and she struggles out of the suit, trembling. The glove on her right hand seems to have crumbled away, exposing her fingers – which thankfully, seem unaffected.

“Get yourself checked in the medbay,” he tells her. She nods and hurries away.

Foster appears through the bay doors the next minute.

“Steve, we need to get back down there,” she says as he sprays her down.

One hour and fifteen minutes.

“We don’t have time,” he tells her, but he’s running through the numbers. They have a titanium-vibranium suit on board that’s resistant to all types of corrosion – it was meant for use on the sun-facing side of Sokovia. If they use that – they could squeeze in a solid half hour of exploration, keeping a ten minute margin to escape the tsunami. It’s enough time – all they have to do is get above the wave.

And it’ll be worth it.

The solution to the Jotunheim mystery might be right under their feet, only to be destroyed forever by the oncoming wave.

He just needs to convince Sam.

He looks at Jane. “Give me a few minutes.”

* * *

Sam’s a good man and a good captain, but deep down, he’s just as much of an adrenaline junkie as Steve is – or used to be, he thinks wryly. Sometimes he feels too old for this. Sam’s only been trying to be responsible because he’s technically in charge of everyone else.

“I’ll consider it if absolutely everyone is alright with the risk,” Sam tells him slightly exasperatedly when Steve rushes up to meet him on the bridge, even though Steve knows him well enough to see that he’s internally raring to go at the sight of a little danger. “Why you gotta pull me into your goddamn shenanigans.”

Steve shrugs sheepishly, grinning slightly. He already saw this coming, and has got a message ready that he shoots off on a global channel to everyone’s wrist communicators.

Jane and Maximoff’s responses come back almost instantly, saying that they’re in.

Tony’s next: in.

Natasha: in.

The handyman, bizarrely, sends a text saying ‘ _sounds fun’_. Steve shakes his head, raising his eyebrows.

Barnes is left. Steve looks over to where he’s sulking in the pilot seat, hunched over a book – trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible from the looks of it.

“Hey,” Steve calls out. “What’dya think?”

Barnes’ eyes flick up from the book to meet his briefly before he seems to shrink on himself further, if that’s possible.

“Sure,” he mumbles.

Steve turns back to Sam, eyebrows raised.

Sam, almost against his own will, starts to grin.

“Alright,” he says. “Let’s do this.”

* * *

(Photograph of mural taken by Jane Foster during excavations on Sakaar)


	3. Tsunami

Sam pulls Steve aside right before he heads down to the loading bay.

“Listen,” he says. “I know the science types. They’re not going to care about their own safety if they think they can get one more carving out of it. And it’s going to be down to the minute here – you get me? Central’s gonna detonate those asteroids in exactly fifty-eight minutes.”

Steve stills. “Are you saying - "

“I’m saying,” Sam grimaces. “Keep your ears open.”

Steve nods. ”Got it.”

Jane’s finished suiting up in the special gear by the time he gets there, and is bouncing up and down on her feet. “Steve!” she exclaims, and he gets the distinct feeling that she’d rush over to him if the winch hadn’t tethered her to a radius of a few feet. “Let’s get started.”

He nods curtly and gets to work.

It takes a precious nine minutes and forty-eight seconds to lower Dr. Foster into the structure again, avoiding the pockets of air inside the mountain of sand that could collapse the whole thing on them. Once they’re able to confirm that she’s reached the antechamber, the photos start coming in. A harried looking Wanda joins him, setting up two holo-screens a meter behind where he’s manning the pulley.

Jane’s voice crackles through his earpiece. “This is incredible. Wanda, are you getting this?”

“Yeah, Wanda says, her voice only a little hoarse. If this is right, this wasn’t exactly a temple - I don’t think this is even the same structure we were exploring above. ”

”Yeah, no.” Jane’s voice becomes slightly tinnier, and Steve looks over to her tracker to check her position. She’s approaching the boundary of the safe zone.

“I think – I think this was some kind of Colosseum.” Jane continues, in a daze. “These glyphs – Wanda, look at them –“

Wanda hisses between her teeth. “I’m getting them. Asgardian again.”

“Yes,” Jane breathes back, her voice cracking. “Yes, they are – god, I recognize this grouping from Jotunheim. This is insane –“

Steve’s stomach swoops with excitement, but at the same time his eyes flickalmost involuntarily to the timer.

_They don’t have time._

“Dr. Foster,” he says into his comm, cutting her off. “You have thirty minutes to detonation.”

He registers her faint acknowledgement, and Wanda’s disappointed hiss of breath beside him. The discovery doesn’t matter if they don’t escape alive to let people know about it.

Steve opens a new line on his comms to the bridge. “Dr. Foster’s found more Asgardian glyphs in the lower level of the structure. They match the figure on Jotunheim.”

There’s a split second of silence. “I’m cutting the window down to five minutes,” Sam says. “Barnes says he can handle it. I’ll try and get planetary command to listen one last time.” He pauses. “But be prepared for extraction.”

“Copy,” he replies, and jerks his head over to where Tony’s just skidded in, his expression wild.

“Maximoff,” Tony calls. “You sure these are a match?”

Wanda nods. “The same script at the very least. Perhaps a simplified -”

Tony interrupts her “How much time does she have down there?”

Steve checks. “Twenty-five minutes.”

Tony smiles, and it’s one of those smiles Steve’s gotten used to being apprehensive about, the one that means Tony’s going to put himself or others in danger. "It takes ten minutes to pull her up, right? I can get that down to five _and_ get an extra set of eyes down there.”

Steve sighs, pausing for a second to check Dr. Foster’s tracker again. “Tony how -"

“It’s a prototype,” Tony says quickly. “That’s why I didn’t suggest it before. But when these guys found the first mural of the Asgardian the day before yesterday, I thought, it could speed things up a bit.” He holds out a metallic cylinder. “This baby here is an automated booster and a remote operated camera.”

The comm channel’s open. “Sam-” Steve tries, but Tony shakes his head. “He’s on the phone with the people in charge, but both you and I know that they won’t agree to delay any further.”

Steve does know.

And there’s no _time_.

“Send it down,” he says. “But I’m going to pull Jane up at the safety limit, and not a moment later.”

Tony doesn’t bother answering, just attaches the cylinder to the cable and pushes a button, causing it to emit a faint humming sound and shoot down the wire. An eyepiece unfolds from his headset, and Steve can see him piloting a set of controls at his wrist.

Steve leans over the tracker again. Everything seems to be fine on Foster’s end.

“Jane, you got all that?” He asks.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “I’ll need those extra five minutes, Steve.”

He grits his teeth. “Let’s see.”

He watches the timer tick down. Beside him, Tony and Jane coordinate in murmurs, with occasional inputs from Wanda. He tries checking on the bridge, but Sam’s channel is busy. He must be making a last ditch attempt to convince them to delay the detonation.

Then, he has an idea.

He pings Barnes.

There’s a short pause before the channel clicks open almost reluctantly. “Listen,” Steve says, not bothering with pleasantries. “We know when the explosion is, but that won’t be when the wave reaches us. They’re detonating at the poles, right – we’re pretty close to the equator, so there’ll be a delay -”

“Seven minutes,” Barnes cuts in, his voice as soft as always.

Steve blinks. “You’d thought of this already? Why would – never mind. So what’d you think?”

Steve can almost imagine his grimace, the slight crinkling of his eyes as he looks up exasperatedly. The image is at the tip of his fingers, just out of reach.

“There’s a secondary,” Barnes starts, but then stops. “You can give Foster the extra time,” he says changing track abruptly. “I’ll handle it.”

Steve accepts that instinctively. “Thanks B-“ he starts to say, but the channel clicks off in the middle and the words get caught in his throat.

Switching gears, he recalculates the time they have left and lets Jane know.

The clock ticks down.

Six minutes to detonation, Steve tells Jane to pack up and standby for extraction. She’s used the suit’s capabilities to collect some samples and getting all of it organized eats away at a precious fifty seconds.

“Now,” Jane says.

The winch creaks into motion. It’s not moving fast enough. Steve tracks her movement on his screen. “Tony-” he says.

“On it.” Tony replies. Her tracker speeds up, aided by Tony’s bot.

There’s a fraught silence as Steve watches her move up through the levels of the tower.

“We have detonation, Sam says, his voice tense. “The wave’s nine hundred kilometers away. Impact in seven minutes.”

Steve makes a few quick calculations. If Tony can pull this off, she’ll be back on the ship in five minutes. That gives them two minutes to get above the wave.

“Sam,” he says. “What’s the height of the wave?”

There’s a moment of silence. “Shit.”

“What? What is it?”

“They had scheduled the initial explosion for the morning. And they were planning to drop some more asteroids over the next few hours to give more water to the planet, but now -”

Steve’s stomach drops, dread overwhelming him. “They already dropped the rest, and didn’t bother to warn us of the new height. Sam – how high?”

“Half a kilometer.”

Steve curses. “You got a plan?”

“Working on it.” Sam replies, his voice terse. ”Get the professor up.”

“Copy.”

He looks over his equipment again, calculating. Tony gives him a brief flick of his eyes. Wanda is crouched beside him, her face white. “Wanda,” Steve says gently as he can, “I need you to strap everything breakable here down and then yourself. Make sure you take the fire extinguisher with you.”

She looks briefly confused but nods and scrabbles for the holo-screens, turning them off. He turns his attention to Tony. ”Can you coordinate your robot while from the launch seats?”

Tony meets his eyes and nods, grimacing, but makes no move. Steve opens his mouth, but then refocuses and sees Tony’s frantic movements over his wrist gauntlet and his rapid eye-twitching. Steve realizes he’s currently maneuvering Jane through treacherous territory in real time using a prototype he built yesterday. He doesn’t have capacity to spare. Grabbing his own screen with one hand and Tony with the other, Steve pushes him to the seats and straps him down, keeping one eye on Jane’s tracker.

Once he’s done with Tony, and he sees that Wanda is secure with the red canister in her hands, he tells her what to do and then turns his full attention back to the screen. Two minutes before Jane’s back onboard. Four minutes to impact.

“How’re you doing Jane?” He asks.

‘Steve,” she says. “I’m alright.”

Thirty seconds. She’s out of the temple. He pulls on his goggles and peers out over the side of the ship. The Valkyrie is hovering barely thirty meters from the surface. He can almost imagine he can hear the rumble of the wave hurtling towards them.

He spots a shape emerge from the hole in the sand below the ship. He reopens his channel to the bridge. “Dr. Foster is in sight. Standby.”

He picks up the screen beside him, and glances over at the lever for the bay doors at the other end of the room. Below him, Foster’s shadowy figure is becoming clearer as the winch draws her up.

He makes a split second decision.

He throws the screen. It hits the lever dead on at exactly the right angle with enough force to flip it over. The bay doors start to close,

Five seconds pass.

Then everything happens at once.

Jane topples over the rising loading ramp, the momentum from the winch now sliding her across the floor. The moment he sees her, Steve grabs hold of the cable and unhooks it, saying into his comms. “She’s secure. Let’s go.”

There’s a great lurch, the beginning of a massive acceleration.

Steve leaps, hitting the corner of the bay dock a moment before Jane slams into him hard enough to push all the air out of his chest, winding him; he wraps his arms around the metal of her suit.

The bay doors shut completely. In the crack visible just before they close, Steve sees a wall of blue.

The wave.

“Wanda, now!” he shouts.

The fire extinguisher spray hits the front of Jane’s suit and starts to bubble, expanding into soft foam and making the suit stick to the flooring, encasing the both of them in a shock-absorbent layer.

Then the acceleration really kicks in.

They’re thrown violently backwards as the Valkyrie speeds forward, tilting up like a plane taking off, the foam lessening the shock just enough to make it bearable. Steve can hear the water now, a dull crashing sound as the city collapses behind them under the massive onslaught.

He can’t see much, can barely breathe in the little pocket of air he’s made between himself and Jane’s suit, but his comms are still working fine. Sam’s voice cuts in.

“People, we’re heading into the mountains to escape the wave – it’s behind us and gaining. A secondary explosion is going to be triggered at our two o’clock less than twenty seconds from now. The blowback will slow the wave but we’re well within the blast radius, so brace yourselves.”

A secondary explosion? Steve’s stomach plummets – the mountains, he’s been an idiot. There are asteroids seeded across the planet – only the primary detonation was at the poles, the plan had always been a chain reaction, a series of explosions as the wave swept across the surface. He hadn’t factored it in because the idea – until now - had always been to be out of harm’s wave once the clock hit zero.

“Wilson, close your eyes!” he hears Barnes yell.

A deafening boom echoes through the room, muffled only slightly by the foam Steve’s encased in, accompanied by the sound of the hull creaking, bent inwards by a great pressure. Almost simultaneously, there’s a shattering sound, a high pitched screech, and the ship, tilting heavily upwards in its race to escape the water, gives a great, juddering heave to the left as if hit by a shockwave, rolling almost completely onto its side. 

A second of silence.

“Breach on the bridge,” Sam shouts, his voice panicked. “Everyone, hold your positions. Barnes is down; switching to autopilot.”

Steve’s heart speeds up and he breaks out in a cold sweat. _No_ , he thinks almost involuntarily.

No, he has to be alright.

After what seems like an eternity but is probably less than a minute, the ship finally, finally levels out, subtle vibrations running through the hull as it tries to self-correct for the damage. Faintly, Steve hears the sound of someone unstrapping themselves, and then the foam starts to melt away. He’s holding himself in place by sheer force of will, every part of him straining to start clawing at the foam encasing him, to get out, to run towards the bridge. Through the gap in the suit he sees Tony standing over them, using the neutralizer. Steve and Jane work together to break their way out of it and shakily get to their feet.

He spares a brief glance for the other three – Wanda’s face is white, and Jane looks grim as she steps out of the suit but they look unharmed. Tony’s putting on an air of nonchalance but Steve can tell he’s shaken.

They’re alright. They can wait.

He heads straight for the bridge, a nameless panic running through him.

* * *

When he reaches, its chaos. A jagged crack runs through the glass at the front, which has been bleached of its tint by the secondary explosion, letting the blazing sun in, a stray beam lighting up the smoke wafting from the control panel. Sam’s helping Barnes stay upright, one arm wrapped around his shoulder, the guy’s full weight sagging into him, barely conscious. _He’s alive_ , Steve thinks with relief. 

“Steve,” Sam says. “He tried to pilot through the explosion - you need to take him to medical. I have to do damage control here.”

Steve nods. “Sure,” he says, shoving his own arm underneath Sam’s and locking himself in place around Barnes as Wilson extricates himself and runs to the control panel. Through the other entrance to the bridge, Steve sees Tony rush in. “Sparky’s working on fixing the engines,” Stark calls out. “I’ll help out here.”

Steve nods at them and turns his attention to Barnes, shuffling towards the door. The guy seems almost completely out of it, his eyes glazed and mouth hanging open, a trickle of blood running down the side of his face from one ear.

“Just stick with me,” Steve mutters, hauling him along as quickly as he can. “The med bay’s not too far from here.”

There’s no response. Steve grits his teeth and considers trying signing to see if he’s alert, but puts that aside for the moment– the more important thing right now is to get him to the med bay, and signing would mean letting go. He speeds up, wrapping his other arm around the front of Barnes’ chest. Barnes’ arm comes up to meet his automatically, blindly groping until he catches onto Steve’s elbow.

They reach medical after three agonizing minutes, taking the cargo elevator to avoid using the crew ladders. Steve ushers Barnes over to one of the two beds and tries to get him to lie down and let go, but Barnes’ grip is iron-tight, squeezing hard “Hey, “ Steve says, gently. “It’s just the med bay. I need to check that you’re alright, okay?”

He tries disentangling himself again, but Barnes doesn’t seem to have heard him, his throat working soundlessly for a few seconds before he slurs out a hoarse “Wha?”

“Medical,” Steve says again, drawing out the syllables, but he’s already come to the realization that Barnes’ probably can’t see or hear that well at the moment. The explosion must have been close enough for the flash to have temporarily overloaded his eyes and done some damage to his eardrums. That means he can’t make out where they are or what’s happening. He grabs Barnes’ left hand and carefully swipes out M-E-D with a finger on his palm, hoping the guy’s aware enough to catch on.

Barnes lips mouth the letters silently and his grip loosens somewhat, allowing Steve to settle him down on the bed and move to the supply cart, pulling out a penlight and the standard concussion kit.

He doesn’t know why his heart is pounding. Or why he’s so on edge about this. He’s performed basic first aid a thousand – a hundred times by now.

When he turns back around, Barnes is sitting on the edge of the bed, swaying slightly, his hands splayed out on the sheets. As Steve watches, he presses his eyes shut tightly and opens them, squinting in Steve’s direction, but he doesn’t think he’s able to make anything out.

“Hey,” he says as clearly, as he can, spacing out his words, feeling oddly protective, like no more harm should ever come to the man in front of him. “I’m just going to perform a quick check on you, okay? I need to make sure that there’s no permanent damage.”

He draws closer and slowly puts his hand on Barnes’ shoulder. Barnes jumps, clearly not have had heard him coming, and his squinting eyes go hazily wide. Steve nudges him over on the bed so that he’s more comfortable and pulls out Barnes’ hand again, spelling out C-H-E-C-K slowly on his palm, giving him time to realize what’s going on. Barnes gives a shaky nod after a moment, and Steve gets to work.

On anyone else, Steve would be worried. Damage of this level – well. Steve knows a guy whose hearing got completely blown out by an explosion, and retinal scarring isn’t unheard of either. And that’s on top of the obvious concussion. But something tells him to perform a blood test and when he submits a sample for analysis to the onboard computer, the markers make him do a double take. He pulls up Barnes’ file.

Its’ almost completely redacted.

He frowns, sparing a glance towards Barnes himself; he’s sitting on the bed slumped back on the pillows after the checks, his hands covering his face. Steve flips through what he can see of the file – which is barely anything apart from the name and some SI employment details, logs out and tries to login again with his pre-mission Central authorization. The screen tells him that his credentials are invalid.

He taps his comms and opens up a line to Sam. “Hey, Sam. You got a minute?”

Sam’s channel clicks on, the tail end of him quietly cursing cutting off. “Yeah, man. Is everything okay with Barnes?”

“I’m… not sure. I can’t access his file. His blood work’s showing some strange markers.”

There’s a short, heavy pause.

“He heals … fast.” Sam says slowly. Steve can tell that he’s weighing his words, deciding what he should reveal. 

Steve doesn’t want to pry too much. But he needs to know whether they’ll have to check in at a planetary medical base – which they might have to if the damage to Barnes’ ears is going to stay as bad as it is right now. “Can you give me a factor of how much?”

“Half rebirth capacity,” Sam says shortly after a beat, and then closes the line.

Steve knows what that means.

He checks his notes of Barnes injuries and does a few quick calculations in his head, moving to the supply cart to grab a few healing accelerants and painkillers. He’ll have time to wonder about Barnes’ medical history later. Right now his job is to make sure the guy is alright.

He approaches the bed slowly, putting his hand on Barnes’ shoulder again. Barnes jerks, his hands dropping away from his face, his eyes squeezed shut as he winces again. “Sam?”

“Steve, actually,” Steve says, moving to grab Barnes hand. He doesn’t like the raw vulnerability of the man in front of him, especially when otherwise he’s been so reserved - it feels like eavesdropping on a secret he’s not supposed to know. “I’m giving you some meds.” He folds the pills into Barnes’ palm, giving him time to figure out what they are, and half turns to fill a glass of water from the jug at the bedside. “You’ll have to take some eye drops in a few hours too, once your retinas have stabilized.”

Barnes is frowning down at the meds in his hand, his head listing to one side on the pillow before he pulls it up, blinking hard. Steve touches his elbow gently, and he lets out an angry breath before raising the meds to his mouth, swallowing them dry.

“Shit. I didn’t mean for you to take them like that - here,” Steve says quickly, pressing the glass into his hands. He didn’t mean have them _right now_. Barnes cradles it unthinkingly for a moment before squinting up at where he must think Steve – or Sam – is.

“Sam,” he scrapes out again, voice wavering. “Isseveryone okay?”

Steve pulls one of Barnes’ hands from around the glass and holds his fingers to Steve’s chin. He nods, exaggerating the movement, wanting him to understand, wanting him to not worry about anything other than himself. “Yes, everyone’s fine. That was some pretty impressive flying you did there.”

Barnes slumps back a little, satisfied. He shakily raises the glass to his lips while Steve goes over to the console, dimming the lights and setting up basic monitoring protocols on the computer so that he can check back in an hour. He returns to Barnes, spelling out R-E-S-T on his palm, and waits for his returning acquiescence.

Steve’s just about to leave the room, fully intending to pitch in with the rest of the crew patching up the ship, when Barnes stops him with a hoarse “Hey.”

He walks back to the bed, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Anything the matter?”

Barnes turns towards him, eyes pressed shut, a pained expression on his face. “Is Steve okay?”

Steve tilts his head, frowning. “Yeah I’m fine,” he says, repeating the sign for _yes_ into Barnes’ shoulder. He has no idea why Barnes is worried about _him_ of all people, however much a part of him lights up at the thought. Now isn’t the right time to ask.

Barnes relaxes, slumping back into the pillows. “Okay,” he mumbles, blinks drawing out slowly, clearly about to fall asleep.

Steve gently extricates his hand and leaves the room, the buzzing in his head making it hard to think.

* * *

All in all, the damage is not as bad as it could have been. By the time Steve hauls himself back up to the bridge, Sam’s fully back in control of the ship, inputting the commands for a low-orbit injection while fielding calls from the authorities through his comms, and Tony’s set up a nano-mesh across the crack in the windscreen.

“Will that hold?” Steve asks.

Tony looks mildly insulted. “You’re asking me? I designed this ship, Rogers. The mesh is self-sealing and self-repairing. The glass will be as good as new in two hours. Say – why don’t you check in on the labs and storage in case anything got knocked over?”

Steve swipes a hand across his head. “I’ll get on that – what about hull damage?”

Tony rolls his eyes. “My bots are already on it, Cap. Get out of here, will you?”

Steve presses his lips together and nods, backing out of the room and heading to the ladder down.

When he gets there, nothing looks visibly out of place; Barnes and Natasha seemed to have strapped everything down before takeoff pretty securely. To confirm, Steve boots up the computer and does a systems check for any anomalies.

He kicks back on the chair, watching as line after line of “SYSTEM: NORMAL” appears on the screen. Everything looks good – the data cache, the operating system, the holotable interface, the stored samples monitoring protocols, the specialized translation programs, the encrypted external messaging server –

Wait, what?

His hand shoots out, pausing the scan.

There it is, right in front of him.

An encrypted external messaging server connected to the bridge computer.

Steve knows for a fact, this wasn’t part of the original specs for the ship – all research data was supposed to be completely secure and so, logically, the lab terminal was intended to be an isolated system.

He pulls up the ship specs.

The server’s not on them either.

So it’s not a preflight update that he missed. Someone’s updated the lab computer with the ability to piggyback off the bridge communications array to send external messages _after_ they left Earth.

Someone’s done this off the books.

He checks to see if the messaging system’s been used. A list of time logs scroll down the screen – all at seemingly random times of the day, but Steve looks at them closer and realizes that all the logs are when he thought the lab had been empty.

Someone who knows how to cover their tracks, then.

There’s only one possible reason to send encrypted messages from the Valkyrie while making sure no one else is around.

Someone on the ship is feeding information back to Earth. Stuff that, Steve bets, the others wouldn’t want to be leaked.

So. There’s a spy onboard.

Quietly, Steve lets the scan resume, deleting evidence of his other activity on the terminal. The minute he’s getting time, he’s going to warn Tony about this – if anyone on the ship has a reason to be spied on, it’s him – most probably by Central, no doubt.

But, isn’t that why Sam was sent? And if it is Sam, he wouldn’t need to use the lab terminal, he could just contact Central using the bridge computer in the event he _had_ been ordered to provide updates.

Unless it was a bluff.

But, why go to all the effort?

Steve lets the scan complete, mind running a mile a minute, but for the life of him he can’t figure out what the answer is.

* * *

Cleanup takes another couple of hours, everyone finally moving to the common room in shared exhaustion after it’s done. Steve checks in on Barnes again – still sound asleep - before joining them.

“Oh hey, Steve,” Jane says warmly. She looks a bit sheepish. “Thank you for what you did at the end, there. You probably saved my life.”

He shrugs, feeling uncomfortable. “Barnes pulled off the hard part.”

Tony lets out a low whistle. “And in spectacular fashion, might I add. Best flying I’ve seen in a while.”

He refocuses on the holotable, where they’ve pulled up all the pictures of the Asgardian glyphs they’ve managed to record. “What’s going on here?”

Wanda, who’s got a blanket wrapped round herself, zooms in on one part. “Seeing if we have enough for a translation.”

A small jolt of excitement runs through him, doing its best to wake him up after the long day he’s had. “And?’

“The bad news,” Natasha says slowly. “Is that we can already tell we don’t have enough to completely translate the text on Jotunheim. I’ve got a few words here and there that I can show you guys later but we’re a long way away from a comprehensible whole. The good news is that the Asgardians carved in a location in the last chamber Foster explored.”

His blinks, not quite able to process the words. “A location?”

Tony nods. “They used galactic standard coordinates in Sakaarian script – it’s a system Foster here developed actually, as the most universal way of communicating a location inside the galaxy. They wanted to be understood.”

Across the table, Sam frowns. “But _these_ guys never had space travel, right.”

Jane nods. “The people of Sakaar never progressed to the level of interstellar technology, yes. But maybe the Asgardians wanted to leave them a message if they ever evolved the capability.”

Steve frowns. “Why all the hostile depictions then? In almost every mural the Sakaarians and the Asgardian seem to be facing off.”

“Wilson – “ Tony starts, but Sam cuts in brusquely.

“No more crazy ideas today, man. I’ll direct our receivers towards those coordinates, and we’ll see if there’s any noise. Meanwhile, everyone, get some rest. It’s been a long day.”

* * *

_Earth’s Galactic Neighborhood: an insight into the scale of Interstellar travel_

_Article by Eric Selvig_

_Where precisely would you find our solar system among the billions of stars of the Milky Way? The answer is towards the inner edge of what is known as the Orion Arm, a lesser spiral arm of the galaxy._ _We, on Earth, are eight light minutes away from the Sun. The Orion Arm is 3500 light_ years _wide. Within the Orion Arm is a partial ring of young stars called the Gould Belt, and within_ that _is a region demarcated by the blast radius of ancient supernovae that astronomers have termed the Local Bubble. Our solar system is currently travelling through the Local Bubble._

_Incidentally, so is Hala. All other notable worlds we have discovered – Sakaar, Jotunheim, and Sokovia included – are well within the Gould Belt._

_No one in the history of humanity has ventured beyond the Gould Belt. Better to scope out new worlds in our immediate neighborhood by physical travel, better to solidify our knowledge of the near before stretching ourselves thin to explore the vast interstellar reaches that remain unseen and unexplored._

_Or at least, that is one reasoning. The other is that it simply requires too much fuel to jump too far and – given increasing energy constraints– the amount of innocent exploration humanity can justify before having to confront the harsh reality of shortages on earth is dwindling with every passing day._

_Much of the galaxy, even today, remains a mystery._

* * *

During the night, he dreams. In the med bay, he holds Barnes’ hand up to his face, the callouses on his palm so new and wonderfully strange. The image in front of him wavers, turns inside out, and then he’s the one on the bed and Barnes is crouched in front of him, hands cupping his face, and Steve, suddenly overwhelmingly terrified, scrabbles backwards, away from the man in front of him, hitting the wall behind him and falling right through into the hard metal of Jane’s suit which wraps around him, holding him tight in an unbreakable iron grip, the foam encasing them both turning suffocating, and he can’t breathe.

He can’t breathe.

He wakes up with a gasp.

He’s up earlier than usual, shaking away the dream and buzzing with anticipation about what the _Valkyrie’s_ receivers will pick up. He heads to the med bay first to check on Barnes, except halfway there he runs into him – almost literally, when the guy stumbles into him around the corner. Steve jerks to a halt, grabbing onto his arms reflexively, feeling him tense underneath his grip.

“Hey, why’re you out of bed?”

Barnes is swaying slightly, staring at the floor, and Steve gets the feeling that – while anyone else less than a day later would hardly have made any improvement – he can make out that it’s Steve this time and not Sam.

“Barnes,” he says gently. “What exactly are you trying to do? You should be back in the med bay.”

Barnes gives a twitchy, violent shake of his head, and then groans, the movement obviously having caused him pain. “Just needta get to my bunk,” he slurs out, still staring right at Steve’s boots.

Steve pauses, considering. It’ll be fine, he supposes, as long as this time he stays put. “Alright,” he says. “I’ll help you there.”

If possible, Barnes tenses even further, but makes no protest when Steve guides him to the sliding door next to his own and helps him get inside. “Wait here,” he says. “I’ll get you some meds.”

He rushes to the med bay and comes back as fast as he can with what he needs, not wanting Barnes to have faceplanted into the floor in the time he’s been gone. Barnes opens the door when he knocks and is squinting in his general direction, so that’s an improvement over yesterday at the very least.

“You’re healing fast,” Steve says, and distantly makes note of the way Barnes’ knuckles turn white on the sheets, then holds out the meds as if to a spooked animal. “But you’ll probably still have headaches and experience some light sensitivity for the next few days. Take these when you need them, alright?”

Barnes’ expression goes blank, but he hesitantly takes the proffered bottle and nods, then turns away to lie down, curling up facing away from Steve.

Steve sees it for the dismissal it is.

Later in the day, Jane sends out a general alert regarding the location the Asgardians left them and Steve heads to the common room where people have gathered in response, all of them similarly both apprehensive and excited, half prepared for another dead end, for disappointment after all they risked. Even Barnes is there, holding on tightly to his mug of coffee and wincing slightly at the noise.

About ten minutes in, Jane skids into the room, her hair wild. Everyone goes silent, the expectation palpable in the room.

“We got a signal,” she says breathlessly. “There’s someone out there.”

* * *


	4. Knowhere

Tony sits up, attention laser focused on Jane. “It’s broadcasting live?”

She nods, biting her lip in excitement. “Yes. A regular repeating pattern. Natasha’s working on decoding it right now. This – this is huge. We’ve only gotten remnants until now. But a live signal?”

Tony nods, a grin stealing over his face. “We found ‘em.”

“Hold up a minute,” Sam says. “Are we sure we want to pull on this thread? Like, aren’t the Asgardians blamed for the destruction of Jotunheim? Do we even want to meet them?”

Steve’s brow furrows. “And the death motif on Sakaar. The Asgardian was constantly attached with murals of battle and destruction.”

Tony whirls on them both. “Don’t you get it? There’s a real possibility that they’re _alive_. We can walk up to them and say _we come in peace_. A race that had mastered interstellar travel ten thousand years ago. Imagine what we could learn from them. Imagine where they are now.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Sam mutters.

Steve catches his eye. “How about we wait for Natasha to tell us what the message in the signal means before making a call? If it turns out the message in hostile in any way, we turn back.”

Jane nods peaceably. “That seems fair.” She turns to Tony, raising her eyebrows. He looks mutinous but subsides.

* * *

It’s the first time Steve’s ever seen Natasha anywhere close to frazzled. The seven of them are in the common room, sitting at the table as they wait for her to reveal what she’s learnt. She pulls up a screen with a mess of scribbling around the edges, and a regular pulsating pattern that is almost hypnotizing to watch dominating the center.

“So the first sequence of the signal translates to _here_ , in the sense of a particular location. Then,” she says, zooming into the next section, “this part means something like _arrive_ as far as I can figure out. There was a similar grouping in the lowest level of the Colosseum, but less stylized so it’s a guess, but a pretty good one. The next part was the most difficult to decipher. We spotted the root word a couple of times in Sakaar, along with what might have been a direct Sakaarian translation but may as well have been something completely different. The root word has connotations of _enticing_ or _interesting_ , but in a larger sense. Closer to amazing, perhaps?” She pauses and grimaces slightly. 

“The last part is probably ‘trade’. It definitely has something to do with buying, but I’m less certain about the selling part. And then you have a three second pause before the cycle repeats again.”

“So,” Tony says into the ensuing silence. “What I’m hearing is basically ‘ _drop by for great deals’_?”

Natasha shrugs guilelessly. “That’s what I’ve got, yes.”

Sam stands up, swiping the head of his chair as he moves away and dropping onto one of the beanbags. “Unbelievable. Are these guys salesmen?”

The corner of Steve’s mouth ticks up. “It’s a possibility.”

Jane taps her stylus on the table. “Merchant races aren’t unheard of. Maybe they wanted a trade empire? An authoritarian race with strict rules about trading … suppose the inhabitants of Jotunheim violated the rules of trade somehow, and so they were destroyed. And perhaps the unfriendly depictions on Sakaar were indicators of them pressuring the Sakaarians into cooperating.”

Wanda runs her hands through her hair. “How do we know they won’t do that to us too?”

“Well,” Jane says with a rueful twist to her mouth. “Humans haven’t been exactly inconspicuous. If they’re still alive, they’ve probably noticed us encroaching on their previous outposts. Maybe they’ve changed. Ten thousand years is a long time. Perhaps they don’t care about something as inconsequential as territory anymore.”

Steve leans back in his chair. “So… you’re saying a past colonial superpower has now evolved into the equivalent of a friendly neighborhood trader.”

Jane shrugs. “It’s a theory.”

“I think,” Tony says, leaning forward over the table, “the _real_ question is whether we take them up on their invitation or not.”

Steve and Sam audibly groan and Barnes buries his face in his hands.

* * *

The eventual consensus is: they’re gonna take the Asgardians up on their invitation.

Why does he put up with these assholes.

* * *

“So,” Sam’s voice says conversationally over the intercom, four hours later. “Normally this kind of jump would have been impossible with standard issue engines. But thanks to Stark over here, this madness is completely one hundred percent within our reach.”

Steve, Wanda, Natasha, Tony and Jane are strapped into their seats around the table in the common room, like last time they were preparing for a hyperspace jump. The technician had confirmed he was secured in the seats in the loading bay the same way as well. Steve’s not sure if the guy knows – or even cares - where they’re heading.

“Question,” Natasha says wryly. “Why exactly would it have been impossible?”

“Too much power,” Tony mutters, unable to keep his mouth shut.

“Because it requires too! Much! Power!” Sam says, his voice determinedly cheerful. “We’re actually setting the record here for the longest jump ever made. But! As I was saying, _please_ prepare yourself for whatever the hell we are doing here.”

Barnes’ voice cuts in over the intercom, as soft as it’s always been the few times Steve’s heard it, a little hoarse, the tone a little wry. “Hyperspace jump in three…”

The ship gives a subtle rattle, accelerating into the jump.

“… two … one.”

The same nauseating lurch, the same sickening feeling of being pulled inside out. An eternity folded into a single instant.

Steve wonders what he’s gotten himself into this time.

The journey through hyperspace to the signal source will take them four days. And this time, there are no briefing packets, no mission to prepare for. Just the unknown, waiting for them.

They go over what they know of the Asgardians, of course. Work on deciphering as much of the new texts as they can by matching them with the Sakaarian translations, but the bulk is indecipherable. There are lots of mentions of ‘war’ and ‘destruction’ as far as they can tell. They make a few contingency plans in case of a hostile welcome. Tony says they can jump again within five minutes of reentry if the aliens have some kind of automated defense systems around their planet. Occasionally, Steve will drop by the labs to help Tony, Wanda and Jane with collating the rest of the data gathered on Sakaar.

But for most of the time, he’s free.

He settles down by the window to sketch again, drawing the hauntingly abandoned rooms of the Colosseum, the terrifying glimpse of the towering wave through the closing bay doors.

At one point, he hears a shuffle of boots by the door. He looks up.

It’s Barnes.

Barnes winces when he sees that Steve’s noticed him. “I’ll get out of your hair,” he says in a rush, before backing out of the door, almost tripping over his own shoes.

Steve opens his mouth, and then closes it uselessly _. I don’t mind you being here_ , he was going to say. Not to mention that he’d like an opportunity to ask Barnes about his odd healing and odder questions, if the guy was open to it - is what Steve tells himself. But there’s a deeper part of him that wants to get to know Barnes just for the sake of it, in a way that’s completely unrelated to the increasing number of small mysteries Steve’s begun to notice on this ship.

He looks down at his sketch. Unthinkingly, he’s doodled some kind of wing. It looks weirdly familiar, but for the life of him he can’t remember where he’s actually seen it.

Shaking his head, he erases it and starts over.

* * *

(drawing made by Steve Rogers on board the Valkyrie, erased shortly after completion)

* * *

That night he dreams.

He’s lying on his SHIELD cot, the one he had been assigned in between rotations of being loaned out to the army. There’s a sharp clack of military boots outside the door, growing closer and closer, and an awful feeling of overwhelming fear washes over him, making him tremble, making his heart speed up uncontrollably and his hands clench down on the metal frame of his bed until his knuckles turn white.

The metal bends under his grip.

_Please_.

The door bursts open, and somehow in the dream he knows it’s not who he expected at all, it’s a young guy with messy brown hair and striking blue eyes, grinning from ear to ear as he bounces over to the cot. Steve stares up at him in frozen terror, his heart hammering in his chest.

The man is not the nightmare.

The nightmare is: he doesn’t know who this is.

He squeezes his eyes shut, his heart pounding, wishing to be anywhere else, to be out of the featureless corridors of the SHIELD facility, away from the coffin, away from the lies he figured out too late to save himself.

There’s coughing.

It’s deep, hacking. The kind that rises up from the depths of your chest, breaks down your lungs with each heaving exhale.

Steve sits up on his small second hand bed – the first one he ever remembers having, the details of which only ever come back in dreams - and follows the sound to the only other bedroom in their tiny apartment, moving quietly, his limbs slightly lagging behind his mind, as if he’s moving through water. Dimly, he notes that Buck has left one of his pulp novels on the dining table again. His hand rises to the doorknob of the master bedroom and the door slides open easily, soundlessly, like it never did in real life.

At the other end of the room, the door to the ensuite is open, and in the mirror Steve sees a blonde head uncurl from over the sink. He meets his mother’s eyes in the mirror, her skin deathly pale and her hair curling damply around her face.

There’s blood at the corner of her mouth.

Steve wakes up in his bunk on the Valkyries gasping, a nameless dread coursing through his veins. The details of the dream are bleeding out of his consciousness with every second, and all he can hold on to is the overwhelming, all-consuming fear, the imprint of white lights on the back of his eyelids.

He rubs his eyes and checks the time.

4:00am.

Well. He’s not going to be able to sleep again.

Soundlessly, he slides the door to his bunk open and pads down the corridor to the labs, planning to get a head start on the data collation to distract himself.

There’s already someone there.

The holotable in Jane’s lab is activated, the mural of the Asgardian meeting with the inhabitants of Sakaar floating above the surface, glowing softly. Leaning over the table is someone Steve doesn’t recognize, which initially makes his heart speed up in surprised fear, but then logic takes over and he figures that by simple process of elimination it’s the one person on this ship Steve has yet to meet face-to-face.

The handyman.

“I know you’re there,” the man says without looking up, his voice surprisingly deep and vaguely accented. He’s tall and broad shouldered, with close shorn sandy hair that appears to have been gone at with a chainsaw. “There’s no need to hide.”

Steve winces and slowly approaches the table. “I didn’t expect anyone else to be awake.”

A rueful chuckle. “Few usually are at this time. Tell me, are we headed to nowhere?”

Steve frowns. “I mean, we’re travelling to the signal source.”

The handyman effortlessly pulls up the pulsating beat of the signal, letting its hologram hover between the both of them. “This one, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah,” he says. “Nowhere.”

“I’m sorry?”

The handyman shakes his head nonchalantly. “Ignore me, I’m rambling. Why do you think you’ll find anyone alive?”

“We’re not sure,” Steve admits. “But a live broadcast is promising.”

The handyman looks morose. “You’re hopeful. That’s good.”

Steve can’t figure out if he’s being patronized, insulted, or if this is just the inherent weirdness of the guy himself. To be honest, he’s not entirely sure if he’s awake at this point, let alone how to respond.

After a moment, the handyman flicks his eyes up from the hologram. “I’ve had this lab to myself for long enough. My apologies for disturbing you.” He swipes across the holotable, powering it down and leaves unhurriedly, followed by Steve’s bewildered stare.

Honestly.

Steve resolves to ask Tony where exactly he recruited so many people who were just plain _weird_.

* * *

The next day, while helping Tony, he does exactly that.

“Barnes?” Tony says. “He’s ex-SHIELD actually, same as you. Stark industries hired him as a pilot as soon as his contract was up. Quiet, I’ll give you that. But he’s the best in the business.”

Stave takes a minute to process that. “And the handyman?”

“The only taker for this mission out of the SI technicians.”

Steve frowns. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“My very public kidnapping on the Sokovian World,” Tony says acerbically, “and subsequent fight with Central didn’t exactly send out the message that I’m a safe person to be around.”

Steve sends him an amused glance. “Fair point. But I have another thing I wanted to talk to you about – in private, if possible.”

Tony’s fingers go still on his screen. “Give me a minute – yeah, done. Hit me.”

Steve tells him about the encrypted messages.

“I don’t want to ask Sam and put him on the spot, you know?” He explains. “In case he was ordered to spy on us.”

Tony’s brow is furrowed. “Sam didn’t send these,” he says, scrolling through the logs, zooming into a few lines of code. “Or at least, not using his own ID.”

“Can you identify the user or decode the messages?”

Tony chews his lip. “On Earth, normally, yes. But I don’t have my code breaker AIs here, and the processing power required to break this encryption would slow down the onboard computer noticeably enough that whoever it is would be onto us.”

“The old fashioned way, then.”

Tony gives a distracted hum. “Yeah… Wait – these messages aren’t being sent to a Central server.”

Steve frowns at the line of gibberish Tony’s highlighted. “How can you tell?”

“Experience,” Tony says, giving him a withering look. “Central servers have their own unique signature, if you know where to look for them. No. These messages are being sent to a civilian location in Missouri.”

Steve blinks. “Say again?”

“You heard me.”

“That doesn’t make any _sense_. Is it a front?”

Tony rubs his hands together. “Give me a few days. I’ll crack this case wide open.”

“Alright. But keep it on the down low.”

Tony smirks. “You got it, Cap.”

* * *

Steve tries not to let his suspicions affect his interactions with anyone else. Clearly, whoever it is means them no direct harm – otherwise, there would have been plenty of opportunities to sabotage the mission on Sakaar. 

But he’s never liked secrets, and this one weighs down on him.

“Cap,” Sam tells him, the day before they exit hyperspace. “I want you on the bridge during reentry. You’re the best strategist we have.”

Steve gives a short, sharp nod “Okay.”

The minutes before reentry are up there with the most tense moments of Steve’s life. One way or another, they’re making history. Either they find the recent remnants of the Asgardians – it must be recent, to still be broadcasting - or they finally meet them in real life, this ancient race that left so many traces throughout the galaxy. He secures himself in the emergency seat on the bridge behind Sam and Barnes, watching as they effortlessly coordinates up in the front, performing safety checks and prepping the engines.

“Okay,” Sam mutters. “Here we go.”

Barnes taps his comms. “Target locked. Re-entry in three… two… one.”

The universe turns inside out, and then stretches out into an infinite second. Steve swears he’ll never get used to the experience.

After a second, the dizzying illusions of hyperspace dissolve away.

The first indicator that something has gone wrong is mammoth structure that dominates the screen. It looks like a glimpse of a pockmarked city, set on top of a shell-like curve, out in the vacuum of space.

Which is directly in front of them.

The second is the blaring of the proximity warning.

Sam curses. “What the hell is that? Barnes, engage the retro thrusters.”

The jump has left them with some forward momentum heading right towards the city, and Steve feels the subtle lurch as the reverse boosters attempt to balance it out.

He knows it won’t be enough.

“It’s the signal source,” he says, bringing up his wrist screen, where the pulsating pattern has locked onto the target – they landed almost quite literally on top of it, which is amazing work by Barnes, but horrifyingly precise.. The proximity warning increases in pitch as their inertia drives them forward.

They’re less than a hundred kilometers away.

The numbers tick down towards zero. The retro thrusters have only managed to slightly decrease their speed.

Slower.

Sam reroutes all remaining non-essential power to the retro thrusters, increasing their thrust to 180% capacity.

The details of the structure become clearer and clearer as they fall towards it. Debris edges its way past the screen, making multiple small collision warnings flare up that Sam and Barnes ignore.

Slower.

Barnes reaches over for another panel, engaging the emergency landing gear. There’s a faint whoosh as a parachute deploys behind the Valkyrie, but there simply isn’t enough atmosphere for it to bring them to a stop in time.

Slower.

Steve can make out the individual buildings now. They’re moving slowly enough Steve can pretend they’re in free fall, as opposed to being thrown towards it in a guided missile.

His eyes latch onto an individual tower, watching almost in fascination as the details resolve themselves - the windows are pinpricks, growing bigger and bigger -

He hears Sam take in a breath. “Brace for impac-“

An endless second.

Then the world is thrown into chaos.

There’s a horrible tearing, rending sound as the Valkyrie rips through the surface, or the structure rips through _them_. A massive shock, and Steve’s thrown against the straps across his chest so hard he almost cracks a rib. Over the intercom, he hears people cry out.

He thinks he loses consciousness for a few seconds.

The low pressure warning starts to blare. There’s a breach in the hull. Gasping, Steve presses the release on the straps across his chest and collapses out of his chair, dragging himself towards the front. There’s a cut across Sam’s forehead, and he’s blinking groggily, but seems awake enough. Barnes has released his own restraints and is hunched over in his seat, drawing in rapid breaths.

The structure was fucking _hollow_ , Steve realizes.

It was hollow, and the Valkyrie punched right through it and out the other side.

There’s probably no other reason why they’re not dead.

Steve staggers over to the intercom, making everyone sound off. They’re all okay. Bruised but alive.

“Put on your suits, people,” Steve says, eyeing the atmospheric gauge. “We’re losing pressure fast.”

“Send -” Sam gasps, stepping into his gear. “Send out a distress signal. The closest human colony is –“

“Hala,” Steve says, his head snapping up. “Contact Carol Danvers.”

Barnes nods jerkily and bends over the control panel, typing furiously. Steve draws in a shaky breath and checks himself over once for injuries. He’ll live.

“Distress signal sent,” Barnes grits out, and pulls himself over to his own gear, putting it on at the same time Steve does.

After immediate damage control, he meets Sam and Tony in the common room, all three of them in their suits. Maximoff is in the medbay, getting checked over by Foster after she hit her head during the collision. Barnes, Natasha and the technician are checking over the rest of the ship for unnoticed damage.

In the twenty minutes since impact, the hull breach has let out enough air from the ship that breathing without their suits would be impossible. The ginormous shell hovers innocuously behind the Valkyrie as they slowly drift away, not a peep out of it after their dramatic reentry.

“First things first. How did this happen? Why were we so close?”

Sam clicks his teeth together. “No one’s ever jumped this far. We usually try and jump to be as accurate as possible, right? So we center the destination matrices on the actual target we’re heading for.”

Tony nods, scrolling down his screen. “That’s how the computers are calibrated, yes. Given quantum effects in the jump drive, for a standard jump focused on a specific target, ships usually end up anywhere in the range of a million miles away. But at this distance, the jump becomes hyper accurate. You jump too far, you land right on target – and you get – this.”

Steve lets out a breath. “And no one ever thought this would be a problem?”

Sam shakes his head tiredly, “Like I said, no one built the engines anticipating we would be jumping so far out of the Local Bubble. It’s never been done. Being _too accurate_ was never a problem we thought we’d have to solve.”

Tony grimaces. “This one’s on me.”

“Stark-” Sam starts.

“Tony,” Steve begins at the same time. He looks over at Sam, and Sam nods at him to continue. “I just needed to know what had happened. No one’s blaming you. And there’s no use in you getting stuck on blaming yourself; there’s no chance of us being able to fix this without you.”

Tony pulls a face but nods, a short sharp dip of his head.

Sam flicks on his own wrist screen. “The nanobots are working on the hull; integrity should be back to 100% by tomorrow.”

“The real problem is the temperature control systems,” Tony mutters, focusing back on his screen. “They were hit head on, fully out of commission. And we lost an oxygen tank, which means – shit.” All the blood drains out of his face.

“What?”

“The temperature control system keeps the ship at room temperature. Without it, it’s going to get really cold, really fast,” Tony says slowly. “I’m talking subzero within eight hours. Close to absolute zero in another twenty. That’s not the problem specifically, our suits are designed to deal with vacuum temperature – the problem is once it gets cold enough, the oxygen in the remaining ship tank’s gonna liquefy, then freeze. And once that happens –“

“We won’t have breathable air anymore,” Steve says, a wave of dread running through him.

Sam curses. “Will we be able to fix temp control?”

Tony shakes his head slowly. “The systems are literally tinfoil right now. My bots will have to build them from scratch, but something of that complexity will take around five days.”

Sam grits his teeth. “Okay, so let’s assume we retreat to the Chariots completely, they have internal heating. The filters in the Chariots, with four people in each chariot, will last forty eight hours.”

The feeling of cold dread creeps further into Steve’s gut. “Personal gear will give us another ten hours each. But it won’t be enough.”

Tony’s voice is grim. “No. Let’s say the ship oxygen fails when it gets too cold twenty hours from now – which is actually an optimistic estimate. After that we have forty eight hours in the Chariot. That’s sixty-eight. Another ten from the suits. Seventy-eight. Hyperspace jump time from Hala to here is –“

“Eighty hours,” Sam says hollowly. “Even if Danvers jumped already, best case is she’ll reach us two hours after we’re all dead.”

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose. “And has she?”

Sam checks his wrist screen. “No. Standard distress response time means they’ll take off in another half an hour.”

The dread becomes a visceral thing behind his sternum. Two and a half hours from salvation, they all die. He has a flash memory of asphyxiating, heaving in great wheezing breaths, of the desperation in each precious movement as his vision went dark. He shivers.

Takes a breath.

Refocuses.

“Okay,” Steve says. “Let’s get everyone to move essential stuff to the Chariots. Let them know it’s about to get really cold; tell them to bring blankets and whatever else they need to. We keep using the ship ventilation for as long as we can. In the meanwhile, Tony, see if you can think a way out of this.”

* * *

In terms of immediate dangers, Steve’s personally more worried about the alien city they just punched through. He pulls Wanda aside as everyone packs up their stuff from the bunks. “Can you perform a long distance scan on the structure? I’d like to know why we haven’t been attacked yet.”

She nods, her expression turning businesslike. 

“It’s dead,” she says half an hour later, all of them huddled in the lab. The temperature drop is subtly noticeable at this point – Steve can see Wanda huddling into her jacket slightly.

“What do you mean dead?”

“I mean,” she says, her accent briefly growing stronger in her exasperation, “that the signal’s the only thing left here. The city’s been abandoned for probably a thousand years by now. Look at how it’s been exposed to vacuum – that’s why it looks so perfectly preserved.”

“So, what,” Tony says. “This is another dead end? We put ourselves on the line for nothing?”

She grimaces, saying nothing.

Natasha steps forward, pulling up a hologram of the curved shell on which the city’s been built and pinching, zooming out. Now that Steve can see it in its entirety, it isn’t a shell at all. In fact, it looks eerily like –

Like a caved-in skull.

Sam curses lowly. “What the hell is that?”

His mind shies away from the actual size of the thing. From a hundred kilometers away, he could just see the curve of what he now notes is the equivalent of the cheekbone. Its actual size would be larger than a small country.

Wanda shakes her head. “I’m not sure. Judging by the organic composition of the base I’d say it might be exactly what it looks like – some sort of skull. But I’ve never seen something so big – I can’t even imagine the kind of environment a creature of this size would need to grow. It might be artificial, intended as a display of intimidation. The important thing is that somebody – possibly the Asgardians – built a city on it long ago, and then abandoned it completely. There’s no threat from here. No help either, I’m afraid.”

Jane peers at the skull. “Where’s the signal coming from then?”

Wanda grimaces again, gingerly poking her fingers inside the hologram of the skull and gesturing at the smooth inner curve of the back of the head. “That surface is acting as a broadcasting dish for the signal. It's set up to process the remaining organic matter in the skull base for power.”

This time, Sam’s not the only one who curses.

Steve’s probably not the only one who’s noticed the horrible irony of a message like ‘ _drop by for great deals’_ being beamed out from the inside of a giant thousand-year old alien skull.

Barnes speaks up for the first time, his eyes intent on the hologram. “This isn’t bait, is it.”

There’s a heavy silence as everyone takes in the implications of that statement.

“Nothing we can do now,” Tony says grimly. “The hyperspace engines won’t work until the ship is fully operational. And even if they did, we’d be dead from asphyxiation before we reached anywhere safe.”

Sam nods, grimacing. “We’ll have to sit this one out and wait for Danvers.”

* * *

_Valkyrie Archives_

_User: Natasha Romanoff_

_Subject: Re: Analysis of Asgardian glyphs on Sakaar (cont., entry no. 8)_

_Summary: Analysis of further word fragments including rough translation of message originating from unexplored quadrant of Orion Arm. Marginal progress has been made on the Jotunheim inscription._

_(Deleted comment: ~~I did not sign up for this shit~~ )_

  1. _come/arrive (derivative of reach? Tense, vernacular usage unknown)_
  2. _warn (????, definitely has negative connotations, associated with teach but probably more intense)_
  3. _(see 2) teach/lesson ( the same root word as 2 but with a positive identifier)_
  4. _here (noun/adjective)_
  5. _no_
  6. _good/amazing/great (adjective, exact intensity and connotations to be determined)_
  7. _buy/trade_



_Translatable fragments:_

  1. _Sample 3A : Come (to) this location (for) amazing trades_
  2. _Sample 7B: (…) arrive (…) warn (…) to teach (….) great (….)_



_Pretty inconclusive, but perhaps the Asgardian were trying to pass some important knowledge on to the Sakaarians_

  1. _Sample 15A: [location in Orion Arm] (…) buy (…) Sakaar (…)_



_This is the message that told us where to look for the signal; needs more work to find out what we’re up against_

  1. _Jotunheim message: has both_ teach _in the beginning and_ warn _near the end, though with unidentifiable modifiers. More formal language than that used on Sakaar (product of time difference???)_



_(Deleted comment: ~~I swear I’m gonna kill Fury~~ )_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are appreciated <3


	5. Subzero

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for this chapter: Attempted suicide, Drinking

The two ground vessels that the Valkyrie comes equipped with are called Chariots. They’re secured on the lowest level on the ship, and though cramped, they have enough space for everyone and their stuff. 

Steve knows that Tony won’t do well in a small enclosed space again, and he’s betting that having Steve’s voice in his ear is not going to help matters after Sokovia. So Tony, Wanda, Jane and the handyman load their gear into one Chariot, the handyman making his first public appearance since their voyage started as he helps Jane with her things and climbs in after her to get everything settled. Sam, Natasha, Barnes and Steve load their stuff into the other. There are four seats in the front and an elongated back long enough for two people to lie down. Steve guesses they’ll be taking turns for the next few days.

Or however much longer they’ll be alive.

By the ship clock, it’s late at night by the time all the essentials have been moved. Everyone gathers for one last meal in the common room, the knowledge that by the same time tomorrow, they’ll be unable to roam freely out in the open on the ship because it’ll simply be too cold hanging over them. Even now, half of them have wrapped themselves in blankets as the temperature drops below what’s comfortable.

For the first time, the handyman has joined them.

Sam and Barnes oversee the distribution of the food packets again with an air of somber finality. Like every other meal, Steve mysteriously ends up with his favorite out of the less than palatable options available, and tears it open, resigned to another go at the never-ending cardboard-tasting bars.

Beside him, the handyman thoughtlessly tears his own packet open and takes a huge bite, almost immediately making a disgusted face. “That,” the handyman proclaims, reaching hastily for the water and gulping it down before wiping a hand across his face. “Is truly horrible. I will not eat it.”

Sam raises his eyebrows. “You don’t have much choice,” he says evenly.

The handyman turns to him, visibly insulted. “Captain, would you show me the real food on this ship?”

“Buddy,” Tony says into the ensuing silence. “What on earth have you been eating all this time?”

The handyman makes an affronted noise. “Not this tasteless… crap.”

“There is literally nothing else to eat on this ship,” Jane replies, eyeing him.

The handyman stops staring at the packet disgustedly, finally seeming to notice that everyone’s staring at him. Steve thinks he sees his expression go briefly panicked before smoothing out into innocent surprise. “….Oh?” He stands up with great dignity. “Excuse me, I must check the stores.”

Everyone watches in disbelief as he leaves.

“So,” Steve says into the ensuing silence. “Anyone wanna bet he has a secret stash of frozen burritos in the storage bay?”

Tony’s still staring at the door. “No, that’s impossible, it wouldn’t have gotten past the scanners – Oh. Low blow, Cap.”

“Stark,” Natasha drawls, amused. “I must commend you on the quality of your employees.”

Tony points at her. “I’ll have you know I take that as a compliment.”

* * *

Tony corners him early the next morning, banging on the outside of the Chariot and calling his name until Steve gears up and steps out. The temperature’s well below freezing at this point, and being out of their suits would send them into hypothermic shock within minutes.

“Tony, what the hell?”

“Shhhh,” the man hisses, looking hunted. “Not here.”

Steve follows him out of hearing range of the Chariots.

“We’re fucked,” Tony says.

He blinks. “Well, I knew that.”

“No,” Tony shakes his head. “It’s not the freezing – or at least not in the way you think. Remember when I said the temperature control systems were tinfoil and my bots would take a while to repair it?’

“I do recall, yes.”

“Well, the metal the bots are working on is starting to get brittle in the cold. They can’t repair it faster than its breaking down.”

Steve frowns, a jolt of adrenaline running through him. “And you can’t fix it?”

“Well,” Tony grimaces. “I was trying to push them, cut some corners - see if they could finish it in three and half days instead of five. But now I’ll need to oversee them personally if that has any chance of working out. And let me be honest, at the rate it’s getting colder there’s probably only like a 12% chance that it will.”

Steve has the strong urge to put his head in his hands, held back by the fact that he’s wearing his suit. “And you think this is the best option we have?”

“At the moment, yes.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “You get on it. I’ll let Sam and the others know. We’ll think of a contingency plan while you sort the bots out.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony nods manically. “But that’s not the only reason I called you here. It’s about the encrypted messages – “

“You cracked them?”

“Like I said, no code breaker AIs here. No golden boy, I didn’t crack them, but I identified the type of encryption algorithm. It’s one SHIELD uses.”

“So,” Steve says slowly, processing that information. “Someone onboard is using a SHIELD algorithm to secretly send encrypted messages to a civilian location on Earth. If you thought it was me we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and the only other person onboard with links to SHIELD is Barnes – I remember you saying he was ex-SHIELD too.”

Tony makes a face.

“What,” Steve says. “You think he’s a plant? SHIELD sending someone to work for you as some kind of a long con?”

“I’m considering the possibility.”

Steve shakes his head, thinking out loud. “On a logistics level I wouldn’t put it past them. But him? He had a bond contract too, right?” On Tony’s nod, he continues. “So let’s assume he gets pilot training while he’s indentured to them, why would he keep working for them after his contract is up? I know I wouldn’t.”

“Is it though?”

“Is what?”

“Is his contract really up. I know the usual length is five years, but the longest bond contracts can last up to forty years, what if he’s still on it?”

Steve dismisses that, making a face. “They must have showed SI something before he got hired that said he was a free man. And even if that document was intended to be a fake, it must have been legal enough to pass screening.”

That gives Tony pause. “Maybe they indoctrinated him with their ideology,” he mutters after a minute. “Got him to believe in their whole global security shtick.”

“Tony, come on. Look at me - do I look brainwashed to you?”

Tony hums, looking dissatisfied. “Gotta say that you don’t. Your contract was five years, right.”

Steve nods, grimacing, He doesn’t like thinking about the time he actually spent at SHIELD. When they loaned him out to the army – that part was bearable compared to the rest. But all he can think about the time he actually spent inside their featureless facility is his cot in the small white room, the thick steel door.

The feeling something terrible was coming.

Tony jerks him out of his thoughts. “Why’d you agree to a bond contract, though? Who’d you give the money to?”

A pounding starts in the back of Steve’s head. “Donated it,” he forces out through his teeth, the answer well worn and familiar. “I wanted to help as many people as I could.” He draws in a breath. His heartbeat is carefully even. He knows the steps to this dance, he knows the pattern he has to follow.

All he has to do is comply.

Tony scoffs, looking mildly disgusted. “Always so flawless, Cap. Where’s the scandal with you?”

Steve shakes himself out of the echoing, buzzing feeling in his head. His tone turns wry. “I think Peggy has enough stories involving me and scandal.”

Tony smirks at that. “That’s true. I still think its Barnes though,” he says, changing track abruptly. “All the signs point to him.”

“I don’t agree,” Steve says, feeling oddly defensive of the man, knowing almost instinctively that what Tony’s saying must be wrong. There’s no way Barnes would be working under the table for SHIELD. “If it was, why wouldn’t he just use the bridge computer? He has the most time up there alone anyway. It has to be someone without normal access to the bridge.”

Tony goes still, making a considering face. “Hmm. Good point.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “We’ll deal with this later. Get to work on the temp systems. I’ll wake up the others.”

Tony gives a sarcastic half-salute. “Aye, Cap’n.”

* * *

_Extract from the Foster Papers_

_The discovery of Hala by Carol Danvers finally provided humanity with conclusive evidence that we were not alone. Or at least – we were, at one point, not alone. The civilization on Hala had been decimated around ten thousand years ago by what appears to be a global level conflict that left no survivors. Carol Danvers and her team successfully documented evidence of mundane facets of life such as public transport and apartment buildings, and additionally unearthed the unique - an advanced supercomputer that seemed to govern the Kree way of life, with servers housed in temples across the surface. The team, originally comprising of Central military and secondary SHIELD assets, in what has controversially been referred to by various parties as both mutiny and a stroke of genius, was able to put in place several protections around the planet that world governments would find it extremely difficult to strike down in the following years._

_Perhaps, this is why legislation was quickly drawn up that would make any subsequent discoveries by military personnel automatic state property. A direct consequence of this is that to date, Hala remains the best preserved monument to an alien civilization, barring only the statue on Jotunheim. Plans for the terraformation of Sakaar are already well underway, and indentured mining on the dark side of the Sokovian World has rapidly developed into a significant contributor to the economy in the years since its discovery._

* * *

The start of the first day is filled with high hopes, everyone clinging to the belief that they’ll find a way out, that this is another escape that they’ll make by the skin of their teeth like they did on Sakaar.

At hour seventeen after their dramatic reentry and subsequent crash-landing, the air circulation system dies with an awful clanging sound that echoes through the ship.

That’s three hours earlier than they anticipated.

In the minute after, no one makes a sound.

Steve’s frozen, the echoing clanging noise waking some primal fear inside him, the faint sense-memory of being unable to breathe locking him in place, a wordless terror gnawing at his soul.

Please, he thinks desperately, not knowing who he’s begging, not knowing why the thought seems so well worn and familiar.

He doesn’t want this to be the way he dies. Not the tightening in his lungs, the slow endless choking, the desperate effort it takes to draw in a single rattling breath.

Please.

Day two starts with an eerie stillness. Steve’s curled up in the blankets on one side at the back of the Chariot, Sam on the other side; Barnes and Natasha had drawn the short straws and had to sleep in the seats up front. He wakes up slowly, carefully wiping away the condensation on the windows.

Outside, the interior of the ship is completely still. There’s that odd blue quality that the air gets when it’s so cold it unimaginable, when it’s so cold that stepping outside would mean death in under sixty seconds, an instant freezing from the outside in.

Tony keeps working on the bots, starting as soon as he wakes and then not stopping even to eat, his face grim.

It doesn’t look like they’ll be done in time.

Jane’s expression turns harried as she works on a solution as best as she can, but Steve can tell she’s stumped. There’s no chemical reaction with the materials they have available that can give them the air they need, no habitable planet nearby on which they can land and take a breath of fresh air. Even the looming monolith hovering at their aft is still and silent, unable to be contacted for help.

Tomorrow they’ll have to put on the suits permanently.

After that they get ten hours of air.

And still, five hours before Danvers reaches them. Five hours during which they will all die gasping, drawing in oxygen-less air, slowly losing consciousness, turning dizzy and then delirious, until their last moment of lucidity won’t even matter to the poor creatures that finally pass away. And five hours is assuming she lands close enough to get to them in minutes.

So, it’s simple math. There isn’t enough oxygen for all of them to survive.

There is one way out, though. Steve does the calculations in his head, the dread growing into a visceral thing in his gut. It’ll work.

But he’ll only do it as a last resort.

* * *

It’s near midnight on the second day when Steve’s woken up by the soft sound of the Chariot seals decompressing.

He catches a flash of brown hair, briefly illuminated in the light through the hatch.

Barnes. He’s going out into the belly of the ship. Careful not to wake Sam, Steve extricates himself from the nest of blankets and suits up, following him out.

Barnes makes his way through the frozen stillness of the ship to the storage room, moving like a ghost through the shelves. Small flurries of crystals billow up around his every step like snowflakes. It takes Steve a moment to realize that the crystals are actually the ship atmosphere, frozen solid in the inhuman cold.

Steve follows him as silently as he can, apprehension creeping up into him that has nothing to do with the cold outside.

Slowly, in a far off corner hidden from view of the Chariots, Barnes stops. His fingers move up from a loose fist to hover near the release for his suit.

“Wait-” Steve blurts out, realizing all at once what he’s planning to do, and Barnes whirls around.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” It’s the first time Steve’s seen any real expression on his face after all the times he’s looked away or hidden himself or melted into the shadows, the first time he’s met his eyes properly.

Steve doesn’t bother answering that question. He’s figured out Barnes’ plan and has to stop him, has to do something to prevent this – he can’t – can’t lose him, he thinks irrationally. Not now. Not after everything.

“Don’t do this.”

“Five hours,” Barnes says lowly. “If I do this now, there’ll be enough oxygen for all of you. Everyone else lives.”

“You’ll kill yourself.”

Barnes laughs hollowly. The crystals float down to speckle his suit, giving him an unearthly halo in the floodlights. “Do we even know that? Who knows, maybe this is all SHIELD did to me all those years. Let me freeze solid and thaw me again like a fucking food packet. Maybe this is what I was made for.”

 _He’s delusional_ , Steve thinks wildly. He holds out his hands, moving forward slowly, not wanting to spook Barnes into pressing the release on his suit, his heart pounding double time. “Listen,” he says. “We’re all working on it. There’s gotta be a better way than this.”

“Are you sure? Cause I did the math. Another four hours of all eight of us breathing and two people have to stop, not one.” Barnes expression goes abruptly tired. “You don’t gotta see this Steve. Go back inside.”

Steve takes another step forward, sending up a small flurry of flakes. “We don’t trade lives, Barnes,” he says, another name on the tip of his tongue, just out of reach. “Don’t do this.”

Barnes makes a pained face, taking a step back. “You won’t even call me by my name,” he grits out after a moment, closing his eyes. He gives a bitter half-chuckle. “I don’t know what I expected, I guess. If me doing this isn’t enough, nothing ever will be.”

“What?” Steve says, his mind going blank. “You want me to call you James? Alright, no problem, but _please_ –“

“Don’t fucking _mock_ me,” Barnes growls, interrupting him, his face like a thundercloud. “I’ve had enough humiliation from you. The least you could do is give me is some dignity.”

Steve feels lost. And still, Barnes’ – James’ - hands, so close to the release on his suit, still the awful knowledge that if he doesn’t do something _right now_ , he could die.

“Let’s talk this out,” he says desperately, choosing to focus on what’s important. He’s going to _kill himself_. “There’s still time.”

Barnes – James? Somehow the name doesn’t sit right – shakes his head, the snowflake-like crystals reflecting the floodlights wildly with the movement, almost blinding him. “Goodbye, Steve,” he says almost tiredly, and his hand moves up to press the release, leaving a flurry of white in its wake like a ghostly afterimage.

Time stretches out, spaced by heartbeats.

“Wait.” Steve says, his eyes going wide. The ice flakes. The _crystals_. Within a split second, moving faster than even he can understand, he lunges forward, wrestling Barnes’ arm to one side, his heart pounding unevenly, hope and desperation giving him strength in equal measure. “ _Wait_. I’ve got it. I know how we can get more oxygen.”

Barnes had started to struggle, but stops moving by the time Steve finishes speaking, his expression mistrustful. “This better not be a trick.”

“No,” Steve says, stumbling over his words in his rush to get them out. “No, the crystals in the air – in the tank – they’re just frozen oxygen, so if we collect them and load them into the Chariot tanks –“

Barnes’ eyes widen. “The heating system will make them evaporate.”

“Yes,” Steve says, nodding desperately, horribly glad to be understood. “And we get breathable air. Enough for _days_.”

Barnes slumps forward, his hands going limp where they’ve been trying to break free from Steve’s grip, his chest having. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Steve lets go and backs away, holding his palms up. “You good?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Barnes says, his breath hitching, not meeting Steve’s eyes. “Yeah, I’m good.”

Steve still can’t believe how close that got. How close Barnes came to hitting the release, how close Steve came to having to watch him die. He still wants to keep an eye on Barnes in case he gets any more crazy ideas. “Wanna head back to the Chariot?” he says carefully, keeping his tone even. He’s not letting Barnes near anything dangerous ever again, he thinks.

Barnes lets out a strangled laugh, seemingly frozen in place. “Geez, Steve. Give a guy a minute here.”

Steve winces. Despite the way a part of him is drawn towards the guy, he has no idea how to handle Barnes and his mercurial temper, the way he alternatively seems to want to be as far away as possible from Steve and then treat him like a long lost friend, the ice and fire that appear in his expressions in equal measure. “Sorry.”

Barnes shakes his head breathlessly, leaning over for a moment so that his hands are on his knees. Then, abruptly, he straightens and pushes past Steve, heading back in the direction of the Chariots without a backward glance.

Steve’s frozen for a moment, blanking on what to do. Pulling himself together, he hurries after Barnes.

By the time he reaches the Chariot, Barnes is already inside, his suit hung up beside the airlock, Steve stumbles out of his, trying to peer inside the hatch as he jumps out of one leg.

Once he’s finally in the module, everything is quiet. Natasha’s apparently taken the heap of blankets at the back in their absence, so only the seats at the front are left unoccupied, Barnes already sitting on the left, his head thrown back against the headrest and eyes squeezed tightly shut. Quietly, Steve slides into the one at the right, watching him out of the corner of his eye.

Just when Steve thinks Barnes is going to pretend to be asleep until morning, he shifts, opening his mouth, then closing it again, his expression oddly nervous.

“Steve,” he says softly, turning his head to face him in the soft shadows of the cabin lights. “I know you don’t want me to bring it up. But I have to, you know? I can’t go on like this. Especially after what you just did for me back there.” Steve looks at him intently, his heart in his throat, willing at him to go on. Barnes seems to gather up his courage. “Do you think you could ever forgive me for what happened?”

Well. That’s not the question he was expecting. Steve knows Barnes was only doing what he thought was right. And it was something that required a lot of courage to even think of, let alone try and go through with it. If he admits it to himself, a few more hours and he had planned something similar, though he admits his idea was probably a tad more dramatic than slinking off into a corner and taking off his suit. Barnes is a good man.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” he says seriously.

“Oh,” Barnes says slowly, but instead of sounding relieved he sounds confused. “Does that … mean you want to start over?”

Steve squints at him, wondering what the hell he’s talking about. Start over in the sense that Steve should forget that less than an hour ago Barnes tried to kill himself while Steve watched? Yeah, if Barnes wants to avoid talking about it, pretending to forget about it will work as well as anything else, he supposes.

“Sure.”

Barnes nods, pressing his lips together and looking away. “Okay,” he says, sounding determined. “I can do that.”

There’s silence for a few seconds. Steve thinks back to their conversation outside in the stores, the scornful reaction Barnes had to hearing his own name.

“So,” he says, not quite looking at Barnes. “What’d you want me to call you?”

Barnes lets out a surprised huff of air. “We’re actually doing this for real, huh,” he says, and for the first time he turns to face Steve entirely - and there’s a smile on his face, a little sad, a little bittersweet, but so bright it makes Steve’s heart hurt. “I’m Bucky.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, rolling around the word in his head. It fits the man beside him in a way that makes both ‘Barnes’ and ‘James’ seem wholly inadequate, slotting into place in his head like it’s always been there. “That’s something. How’d you end up with it?”

“Well,” Barnes – Bucky – says with a soft laugh. “I had this friend who just could _not_ pronounce my actual name, and one day decided that he would call me Bucky and nothing else – and, what’d you know, he was stubborn enough it stuck.”

Steve smiles past the faint echoes of longing that Bucky’s story is bringing up. “Sounds like some friend.”

Bucky presses his lips together and looks at Steve, his expression unfathomable. “He was.”

* * *

The next morning, after Steve and Bucky tell everyone of their realization – without going into the specifics of _how_ exactly they came to it - there’s an air of celebration. Ceremoniously, Sam and Jane go to the Valkyrie oxygen tanks, filling up literal buckets with the frozen crystals and depositing them in the Chariot reserves. Tony starts talking about sending his robot out to investigate the structure – that they’re still floating barely a few miles away from – and no one objects.

“Danvers will be here next morning,” Sam says, once everyone has settled down, and the fresh oxygen has successfully started making its way through the Chariot systems.

Natasha raises her eyebrows. “Do we even need any assistance now?”

“Well,” Steve replies. “It’ll still take another day for the bots to fix up temperature control working normally. If this was bait of some kind, we don’t want to be sitting ducks.”

She quirks her mouth. “I suppose not.”

“Wait,” Tony says. “Shouldn’t we give them a collision warning? We don’t want them to crash into us or the city.”

“Already done.” Sam says. “In any case, I think this calls for a celebration.”

Wanda gives an amused huff. “We’re overdue for Sakaar too, technically.”

Steve sees Bucky make a gently amused face, trying not to watch him directly. “How’re we gonna celebrate stuck in the Chariots, birdman?”

Sam knocks him on the shoulder. “You underestimate me. Stark, is that booze I saw you sneaking onto the ship frozen completely solid or what?”

Tony looks up guiltily. “I kept it with the samples, so it’s perfectly alright, actually.”

Steve can’t help it, he laughs.

They jury rig the chariots together so that the doors open up into one another, sealing the area with a portable airlock – essentially making the Chariots together one giant room, albeit one with a criminally low ceiling. It’s a lot of work for little return functionally, but seeing as they have one night more as this cobbled together group of people that has saved each other’s lives multiple times by this point, Steve can’t help feeling a warm glow in his chest as he’s setting it up. This is what it’s all about. The little spaces in between the chaos, the little successes. Beside him, Bucky sets up the other side of the airlock and gives him a tentative smile.

At around what their ship clock tells them is nightfall, they gather in their makeshift room, Tony having brought his bottle of scotch and the handyman bringing a space heating lamp that they gather around, it’s orangeish-yellow glow wonderfully like a campfire.

Tony opens the bottle with a flourish. “To Capsicle and our pilot! Who saved us all from certain death a second time.”

There’s a chorus of hear hears, and Steve feels his face turning red. On his left, he feels rather than sees Bucky try to turtle into his the collar of his pilot suit out of embarrassment. Sam pats Steve’s back from on his right, giving Bucky a solid, reassuring glance. Steve knows that he knows that Steve doesn’t like the attention – the same probably goes for Bucky. “Alright now, pass it over Stark,” Sam calls.

“Hey, give a man a moment, Wilson.” The room dissolves into bickering, and Steve sees the handyman, sitting next to Jane surreptitiously pull out a flask from one of his pockets. Tony notices too, letting the bottle go in his distraction. “Hey – what’s that?”

“Oh,” the handyman says simply. “This isn’t for you.”

Tony’s mouth drops open in indignation, and Sam throws his head back and laughs. “So much for your scanners, Stark.”

Tony splutters. “That’s impossible – where did you even get that?”

The handyman shrugs guilelessly, passing over the bottle of scotch to Wanda when it’s his turn and choosing instead to uncap his flask.

Bucky shakes his head when offered the bottle. “I’m still taking meds after Sakaar, so not today thanks.”

Steve watches him, something soft welling up in his chest. He’s no longer fading into the background like a ghost, no longer hiding his face behind his choppy hair. He looks happier, in some indefinable way, like their midnight conversation in the Chariot lifted a burden from his shoulders.

Wanda passes Steve the bottle, and he declines with a regretful shake of his head. “You’ll just waste it. It doesn’t have much effect on me.”

“Ah,” the handyman says, suddenly looking up. “You are like my lady Jane.” Out of the corner of his eyes, Steve sees Sam send Jane a wild look, barely suppressing laughter, and Jane, to his eternal surprise, _blushes_.

He raises an eyebrow at her. She smiles, explaining: “Rebirth.”

“Oh,” he says, understanding. “Well,” he tells the handyman. “Not _quite_ that.”

“It is of no matter,” the handyman shrugs equably, holding out his flask. “Do you want to try this? It may suit you more than the others.”

Well, he thinks. There’s very little chance whatever nightmare concoction it is will actually get him drunk. And even if it does – well, this is the occasion if any. They escaped death literally by the skin of their teeth. Saved by the midnight snow, if he’s being poetic about it.

“Sure,” he says accepting the flask and taking a long pull. It’s delicious, actually - like honeyed mead, except stronger somehow. More of a kick, like someone’s added spices and pepper, but just in the right amount. He coughs a little, after, and Tony jeers.

“Not used to the hard stuff?”

He shakes his head, handing the flask back to the handyman. “No, that was amazing. Where’d you get it?”

“Forget that, how’d you sneak it onboard?” Sam adds, sounding genuinely curious.

“I brought it from my home a long time ago,” the handyman says simply. “And I have my ways.”

Natasha makes a scoffing sound, closely followed by Tony, and gestures for the scotch. “Like I believe that.”

Over the next few hours, Steve laughs more than he thinks he has in years, taking the handyman’s flask when it’s passed to him again and having some more, feeling like he’s drinking liquid sunshine.

At one point, Wanda asks him about what he used to do before his time on the Valkyrie. Steve doesn’t want to spoil the good mood he’s in, so he keeps it short, hardly noticing that there’s a slight lag to his words, like they’re heavier than usual in his contentment. “Was in SHIELD for – a while. Then college, then got recruited for the Sokovian thing. After that,” his throat goes tight as he remembers Peggy and their work together, and his voice cuts off. Sam notices, and unobtrusively diverts the attention to Tony, asking him about the Sokovian legislation.

Tony won’t like that, he thinks vaguely. But it’s out of his hands.

Time blurs. It’s a while later, but he’s not sure how long, when Tony’s telling one of his tall tales that are wildly ego-inflating and self-depreciating in equal measures, saying something that’s just so obviously, blatantly wrong, so much that Steve feels like he has to go over there and shake some sense into him, that he tries to get up to physically shake him and realizes that the room isn’t as stable as it was a minute ago.

“Woah,” he hears himself say distantly. His lips are numb. The walls of the Chariot are wavering around him, closing in on the group. Okay - okay, then. It seems like whatever he’s been drinking has crept up on him without him noticing. He holds his hand up in front of his face and watches in amazement as it seems to shimmer, turning golden in the light from the lamp. Is that – is that normal? It doesn’t seem important, not when he’s feeling really, truly happy right now, like he hasn’t felt in so long.

Bucky laughs, and Steve falls back and lists into him, deciding that okay, he should probably sit down. Standing up is hard work, and he’s feeling warm and comfortable and perfect right here, like laying down in the grass on a sunny day.

“Wow, Rogers,” Tony drawls out. “So much for it not having an effect on you.” Steve feels too nice to try and argue with that, and why should he bother, he thinks magnanimously. It’s not like Tony has a hand to stand on – no, that’s not how it works. Anyway. It doesn’t matter.

He smiles, leaning into Bucky more, letting the waves of conversation wash over him. Bucky doesn’t move, not going tense, exactly, but remaining still and calm, like a rock in the ocean.

It’s nice.

A while later, he blinks his eyes open to see that Sam’s shaking, him looking slightly concerned. Steve flaps his hand at him, saying that he’s perfectly alright, he feels great – everything’s so warm and wonderful and far away - but it must come out too garbled to be really understandable. Sam frowns, and looks over at Bucky, who Steve can feel nod against him.

“I’ll get him back to the front to sleep it off properly,” Bucky tells the others, Steve watching his mouth shape the words in fascination.

That’s a little unnecessary, Steve feels. But it’s really nice of Bucky to care.

Bucky wraps one arm around him, gently urging him to stand up, which probably takes longer than it should. Steve’s too gone to tell. Bucky nearly has to carry him over to the chairs in the front, settling him down and checking him over in a way that makes everything go kind of extra hazy and warm for a minute. He’s never been more comfortable and happy in his life. He thinks he might be about to fall asleep.

“Hey.”

He blinks his eyes open drowsily. There are grey-blue eyes peering into his concernedly, and for a minute Steve can’t figure it out – Bucky’s staring at him so worriedly, and he has to do something - does he look at the right eye or the left? He can’t look at both, that would be stupid. And overwhelming.

“You okay?”

Okay? That’s - that’s a question, and he’s supposed to answer it. He nods dumbly, watching as Bucky pulls away slightly, leaning over to grab a bottle of water. Steve follows the movement of his hands as he twists the cap open. His fingers are so _interesting_ , and they must be clever too, being able to pilot the Valkyrie so well. Steve could watch them forever.

“ - some of this. Didn’t think you could still get drunk, to be honest.”

Clumsily, he grabs the offered water and takes a few sips. “M’ok,” he says, but he thinks it didn’t come out the way it was supposed to.

Bucky takes the bottle and carefully puts it away off to one side. He gives a half-smile, closing his eyes for a moment, then sighing almost fondly, but with a touch of exasperation. “Get some rest.”

Steve thinks that sounds like a good idea, but there’s also something – Bucky’s face right then – there’s something – something he forgot, something he has to do _before it’s too late_.

Something he has to do before he loses him forever.

He’s struck by inspiration, overwhelming and absolute. He knows what it is – he knows what he has to do.

It’s important, he thinks muzzily. It’s the most important thing he’s ever done. He has to do it _now_ , before he forgets again.

He reaches forward, and Bucky is right there in front of him, and he’s so – god, he’s so beautiful. How did – how could Steve _forget_ –he’s the most beautiful thing Steve’s ever seen. His hands come up to cup Bucky’s face, the heel of his palms making feather-light contact with the dimple in his chin, the stubble feeling scratchy, but far away.

He leans forward, tilting his head slightly, his eyes fluttering shut.

There’s – a hand. On his wrist. Steve opens his eyes, inches away from Bucky’s face.

Bucky’s expression shutters, going eerily blank and - no. No. Steve didn’t want that to happen, how does he make it go away, how does he make it stop.

“You should go to sleep,” Bucky says softly, pulling away. There’s something broken in his voice.

He turns away, curling up facing the door opposite him, and Steve watches, wounded beyond all words, wondering what he did wrong. This is important. He has – he has to fix this. But Bucky’s not looking at him, and he – he needs to do this properly, or else it won’t work.

Tomorrow, he decides, through the way the room is spinning. He’ll make it all better tomorrow.

He closes his eyes.

* * *

“Everyone up!” Sam yells, pounding on the walls of the Chariot, and Steve nearly falls out of his seat, scrabbling backwards in alarm. His head is splitting and there’s a horrible taste in his mouth, like something’s died inside it. It takes a moment for him to figure out why he feels like he’s fucking dying. Is – is he hungover? Is that what this is? He groans, wishing the pounding would stop.

Unfortunately, it’s not all inside his head.

Sam’s voice joins the internal cacophony again, yelling absurdly loudly, making Steve dizzier than ever. He just wants it to _stop_. “Danvers is here!” Sam yells. “ETA in five, everyone suit up!”

Steve feels someone crouching over him, and he squints his eyes open the slightest amount, hoping against hope that it’s Bucky. It’s not. Natasha is leaning over him, one eyebrow raised. Steve groans, squeezing his eyes shut again.

She pokes him in the chest. “Up and at ‘em.”

He tries to bury his face in the fake leather of the chair, but neither gravity nor Natasha are working with him, and she grabs an arm and drags him upright.

“Get into your suit,” she says sharply, and something in the cadence of her word, the faint echo of his squad leaders in the army, finally makes him sit up straight, albeit blearily. He looks around wildly – the Chariot’s empty except for the two of them. Also, moving his head was a mistake. He groans again.

“Where’s Bucky?”

She quirks her head, already pulling on her suit. “Out already. Catch up, old man.”

Creakily, he moves to where she is, laboriously pulling on his own gear. He feels terrible. He hasn’t had a hangover in – in forever actually. This is probably the first time he remembers getting drunk. Then the blurry memory of what had happened just before he fell asleep pushes its way to the front of his consciousness and he stumbles.

Natasha stops what she’s doing. “Alright there?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, mind doing its best to process what he’s just remembered in its beleaguered state. He follows Natasha out in a haze. He – did he try to kiss Bucky? – was that really a thing that happened?

What the _fuck_.

Now, Steve can acknowledge that the guy is attractive, and that something about him, the way he carries himself, his piercing grey eyes and his rare smiles, draws Steve to him – but, fuck, they haven’t even talked to each other - mostly because of all the times Bucky’s run away from him. The only real conversation they’ve had was him trying to stop Bucky’s aborted suicide attempt, and then that moment in the Chariot afterwards. And somehow, all that raw emotional vulnerability, that relief and those buried emotions Steve’s been harboring for so long – but such a short time really, in the scale of things, just the few weeks they’ve been on the Valkyrie - bubbled up at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way, and made his drunk self think it was a good idea to try and make a move on the guy.

Fuck.

He’s got to apologize. Clear things up.

He jogs slightly to catch up with Natasha, resolve strengthening. He doesn’t want to lose the tenuous friendship they’ve built, that growing connection that’s infinitely precious in a way Steve can’t quantify. He’ll do whatever he can to make up for his absolute dumbass _stupidity_.

When they get to the airlock, everyone’s standing near the door in their suits, Sam already talking into his comms as he coordinates with the pilot of Danvers’ ship just outside. Steve can make out Bucky too, facing resolutely away from him, not glancing their way unlike the others as he and Natasha arrive.

So – later? After they’ve dealt with the newcomers, at least. He can understand Bucky not wanting to make a scene in front of everyone. It’ll be the first thing Steve does when he can get him alone.

That decided, Steve focuses back on the airlock, his mind still working too slow for his own liking. He’s never drinking again. Get back on track, Rogers. Danvers. Carol Danvers is here, just about to enter their ship.

Carol Danvers is here, and he’s _hungover_.

Fuck.

When Steve was working through his full ride at college, the video he saw that changed his life, the video that woke up something inside him that he had believed long dead, was of _her_ , exploring the ruins on Hala, talking about the friends, the people that humanity had just missed meeting. It was something that took root in him in a way nothing else did, beyond all logic or reason, something that echoed a buried part within him that was just out of reach.

Danvers was ex-military, and received the same serum Jane had during her career for her exemplary service. She had served for thirty years before retiring to safeguard the place that she had discovered.

Steve had always wanted to meet her.

The airlock cycles, and then hisses open. The figure inside steps forward and turns down the tint on its helmet, and it’s her, in the flesh. She has shoulder length blonde hair, and a face equally given to firmness or laughter, though right now it’s settled in an easy smile. Out of all the crowd gathered around the airlock, her eyes catch onto his, and she steps forward towards him, bringing her hand up for him to clasp.

“Steve,” Carol Danvers says warmly, the first time Steve meets her. “It’s good to see you again.”

* * *

(storage shelves on Valkyrie, three days after re-entry)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments give me life <3


	6. Assault

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your lovely reviews last chapter! I'm not entirely happy with this one, but hopefully it sets the stage for the next reveals decently.

Steve’s frozen, staring at Danvers. He knows her yes – but in the distant way one knows a celebrity, someone on a screen that you never expect to meet, let alone greet you by name when you come face to face. Her expression morphs into a mock-insulted smirk as the seconds lengthen. “What, had a rough day?”

He snaps out of it, feeling the stares of everyone else drilling into the back of his head. He has to make a decision, and fast, if only to avoid looking like an absolute idiot. He shakes himself and accepts her offer of her handshake. “Good to meet you, Colonel” he replies, “But I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, ha ha. Well, I see the whole gang’s here. Captain Wilson, care to care to come into my lair?”

Sam, beside him, grins. “I’d be delighted to, Colonel. Lead the way.”

She gives a quick nod, scanning them over with her eyes and then making a sharp about face, stepping back into the airlock and waiting for all of them to crowd in before hitting the lever to seal them off from the Valkyrie.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the respect,” she says, as the airlock cycles again. “But it’s really not necessary. I’ve been retired for quite a while – just call me Carol.”

Sam makes an uncomfortable noise. “Don’t think I can do that.” Steve feels the same, to be honest - Danvers is, quite literally, a living legend. She changed the game, discovering Hala decades ago on a regular reconnaissance mission, and then handling the subsequent media frenzy and logistics with such forceful aplomb that even Central couldn’t shove her out. If he was an army guy – which he isn’t anymore, he’s had enough of having to follow orders– he likes to think he’d be like her.

She shrugs, motioning for them to take off their suits as she starts doing the same. “Eh, it’s your loss. I’ve set up some rooms for you on the upper level; I’ll just show you to them. The engineers are working on getting our ship’s systems to heat up the interior of the Valkyrie - that should take around three hours. Then you guys can head back and get your stuff before we leave.”

Jane pauses, holding her helmet. “Wait - are we leaving the Valkyrie?”

Danvers explains, and Steve admits that it does make sense. It’s not one hundred percent safe to initiate a jump on a ship that’s been so recently heavily damaged. So they’re hooking up the Valkyrie to the Pegasus like an oversized trailer and dragging her back to Hala behind them. It’ll be more fuel efficient to maintain habitable conditions in one ship instead of two, and so everyone’s moving to the Pegasus.

Steve tries to keep an eye on Bucky, to get a moment alone so he can talk to him, but Bucky seems to be determinedly avoiding him, keeping the bulk of the rest of the crowd between them as Carol leads the Valkyrie crew through the ship while talking to Sam about what they’ll be doing next. Something makes him look to his other side, where Natasha’s frowning at him.

“Funny that Danvers singled you out, isn’t it?” she asks.

Steve rubs his forehead self-consciously. “Yeah, I don’t know what that was about.”

She pauses, pursing her lips. “You sure you didn’t meet her while you were in the army?”

“No,” he says. “That was _way_ before my time. I was Sam’s CO for a while, but I never met her.”

They’ve reached a corridor lined with small cabins. Danvers points out the rooms they’ve been allotted and before Steve can make a move to stop him, Bucky slips into the first one soundlessly, almost slamming the sliding door shut. Steve couldn’t even see his face – he was staring at the floor, his hair untied and covering his eyes. God, he has to apologize. He has to do _something_ to fix this.

Natasha’s still watching him. “What did you do before SHIELD?”

He almost stumbles, a jolt going through him. He doesn’t - he doesn’t like thinking about before SHIELD. There’s a pattern here, lingering in the recesses of his mind and he latches on to it, letting the buzzing in his head grow louder. “Nothing much. I was pretty young.”

The flash memory of a crowd, of blond hair. Feeling safe, protected, like the storm of the world could be held at bay.

He blinks, shuddering. That’s not -

Up ahead, Danvers has reached the end of the corridor and is telling them all to settle in in her clear, carrying voice. Beside him, he can sense Natasha drawing in a breath to ask another question, and he needs to get out before she asks it, before she opens up memories that he locked away a long time ago - he needs the buzzing in his head to go away. He grabs onto the nearest door and wrenches it open, almost falling inside.

“I’ll see you later,” he mumbles at her without meeting her eyes then hastily starts to shut the door before a voice makes him freeze.

“Steve,” Colonel Danvers calls, her head cocked to one side. “A word?”

He goes tense, his hand still on the door, about to pull it shut. There’s a steady, throbbing ache in his head, and he looks up at where she’s standing with no small amount of dread. He doesn’t want to do this right now. He wants to – get away from Natasha’s questions, first of all, and then he has to find a way to make it up to Bucky, and after _that_ he has to make sure that whoever’s spying on them isn’t going to start actively sabotaging them now that they’re off-mission, and then there’s something – something else that’s been nagging at his mind ever since they crash landed, spurred on by one of Wanda’s offhand comments. Something important.

But it’s Carol Danvers. What Steve wouldn’t have given, a year ago, a week ago – even yesterday, to talk to her just once, let alone have her invite him for an entire conversation. He steels himself. “Sure,” he manages, and stiffly steps out, pushing past Natasha without looking at her and giving Sam, who’s staring at him with a distinct air of worry, a brief reassuring glance.

Danvers gives him a quick nod and starts to lead him away from the rest of the Valkyrie crew. Before he closes the door at the end of the corridor, he looks over his shoulder.

Natasha is still watching him, her expression carefully blank.

* * *

_Transcript of interview with Pepper Potts, acting CEO of Stark Industries_

_…_

_INT: Can you comment on why SI has chosen not to use bond contracts, especially in light of their established history and success with SHIELD?_

_POTTS: Well, here at Stark Industries we believe that our employees should have the choice to come to work out of their own free will. This perspective motivates us to provide high wages, benefits and working conditions that continue to attract the best talent over the world, producing the results that we’re famous for._

_[cont.] I do commend Fury [note: current head of SHIELD] for the steps he has taken to reduce the cap on new bond contracts and am currently pushing for the abolishment of the same. I understand that there are many who feel that the contracts and their resulting payouts are the only way to ensure our continued security and raise thousands out of poverty. However, I personally am of the opinion that these contracts themselves are a product of a harsher, more militaristic time and that in today’s world there should no longer be reason for any individual to have to sign ownership of themselves over to a corporation to ensure the survival of themselves or their family._

_…_

* * *

Danvers takes him to a small lounge on the Pegasus, a few luxurious looking sofas clustered around a floor-to -ceiling window giving them a bird’s eye view into the star filled void and the enormous deserted skull-city floating in the distance. She catches him staring. “I know,” she laughs. “We had to commandeer a private vessel when we got your distress signal, it didn’t give us much time for options. On the plus side, we did get some fancy-ass furniture, I’ll give you that.”

“Uh..” he says, like an idiot. What exactly is he supposed to say here? Why did she want to talk to him specifically, for one, is a blaring question running on a loop in his head. Fuck – is this about his and Peggy’s last case on Earth, before he had to leave? He didn’t think Central had much of a hold out here in the far reaches of space to grill him about that, let alone on Danvers - but maybe they’re getting bolder. “Why’d you want to talk to me?”

She rolls her eyes, dropping onto one of the couches and gesturing towards him to do the same. “I know it’s been a long time, but I’d have hoped we were past all the formality. I was worried, you idiot. I haven’t heard from you in ages.”

_What?_

Danvers is clearly mistaking him for someone else – someone else she seems to know much better who apparently looks exactly like him and is also called Steve, but someone else all the same. He feels a stab of regret. She didn’t really want to talk to him, just someone who she thought he was. Still, it would be wrong to let this continue. “I’m sorry, I really think you have the wrong person.”

She stills, cocking her head. “Steve Rogers? Ex-SHIELD, loaned out to Central military forces during your contract?” She looks at him, expectant.

He swallows, throat dry. “That’s me. But we haven’t met before.”

Her eyes narrow. “I know SHIELD takes its confidentiality pretty seriously, but this is pushing it.”

 _Pushing what?_ Steve thinks, staring at her, nonplussed.

“Not to mention,” she continues, her tone growing harder when there's no response from him, “that it’s insulting that you’re trying this with me when I made sure there’s no one else around.”

She pauses and presses her lips together, letting her hands clench and unclench while Steve tries to figure out what she's talking about. “I always thought it was bullshit that they made sure you got none of the credit," she says. "You were a good soldier and a good man. All the rest of my squad got medals for the discovery.”

Steve shakes his head, more confused than ever. “The discovery of what?”

She looks at him like he’s a particularly dumb baby animal. “Hala? The big ol’ planet we’re heading towards?”

 _What_?

Danvers, Steve decides after a moment more of trying to make heads or tails of what she’s saying, is crazy. Either that or she’s pulling his leg in some giant kind of fucked-up prank – which makes sense, actually, if Central got to her. Taking it out on a guy who’s already down is just their style.

He shakes his head, pushing down a surge of anger. “I don’t appreciate this,” he says slowly. “I’ve already told you that you’ve got the wrong person. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do here, but I'm not interested. I’ve played enough games back home.”

He stands up and turns to the door, meaning to leave, but he's not quick enough to miss seeing Danvers’ expression morph from confused into a thunderous scowl. It’s not his problem– he’s going back to his bunk and he’s going to figure out how to approach Bucky so that he can apologize. He has enough issues of his own - Danvers has done her duty in rescuing them and he doesn’t intend to let her become another.

 _Never meet your heroes_ , he thinks bitterly, heading back to his room.

The saying’s popular for a reason.

* * *

His plan is simple. He’s just – going to tell the truth. He was drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing. That doesn’t take away from his own culpability in any way, but Steve knows – knows he would never do something like that in his right mind, never presume someone’s interest without making sure first. He’s sorry for overstepping Bucky’s boundaries, and will accept whatever repercussions that he deems fit.

He’s ready.

He slips out of his own room and gently taps on Bucky’s door right next to his. No response. He waits a few minutes. Knocks again, a little louder. Waits some more. Considers using his wrist communicator to ping him, but doesn’t want to push.

He’s raising his hand to knock one last time when on the opposite side of the corridor, a door opens and Sam’s head peers out. “Hey, man.”

Steve freezes, feeling like a deer in the headlights. “Hey.”

Sam looks as awkward as he feels, and seems to internally brace himself before stepping out into the corridor. “Look, Cap – Steve – I don’t know what happened between you and Barnes, but he was pretty upset this morning. And, uh, he asked me to ask you to give him some space.” Sam makes a face, still looking awkward as hell but also ready to throw down if Steve ignores him.

It’s an expression of Sam’s that Steve knows well.

He just never expected to be on the other end of it.

“Oh. Alright,” Steve says, feeling hollow. Sam’s a good friend, and there’s no question of him ignoring anything - he’s going to respect whatever Bucky wants. He musters up a wan sort of smile. “Thanks, Sam. I’m sorry you had to play middleman.”

Still looking uncomfortable, Sam mutters, “Don’t mention it, seriously,” before retreating back into his room.

So.

Steve steps back into his own cabin too, collapsing on the overlarge, too-soft bed and putting his head in his hands. Bucky’s not ready to talk to him. That’s – that’s probably okay; he’s patient. He’ll wait until Bucky tells him he is.

He checks his wrist computer. Still another couple of hours until they can get their stuff from the Valkyrie. It’ll be lunchtime after that. And god, now he has to avoid the captain of the Pegasus too on top of everything else. He sighs.

Problem number two: the spy. He calls Tony. The ensuing conversation is… decidedly unpleasant. Tony’s still snippy about the fact that he hadn’t been able to figure out the oxygen thing _or_ fix the issue with the bots in time. Steve’s learnt from experience that after the danger has passed, Tony’s used to taking his insecurities out on everyone else in the worst way. They almost get into a fight as bad as the one they had when they first met, and Steve has to clench his fists so hard that his nails cut into his palms to keep from outright yelling.

After he hangs up, Steve has to press his hands to his eyes and take deep breaths for a few minutes, the beginning of another headache setting in. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t done anything to get over his initial hangover.

Tony is his friend and one of the only people Steve’s met that he really, truly trusts. He knows that.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to get along with him.

So: no more talking to Tony today. They’ll just start arguing again, and Steve doesn’t want to make it any worse than it already is. What he did get from the conversation is _no Cap, I haven’t been working on the encryption, I was busy trying to save your self-righteous ass_ which essentially means there’s been no progress on that front either – so much for that. He grimaces. The mystery of the spy will have to wait. The only people he can reliably eliminate are the two of them, and while he wants to count Bucky and Sam out too, his gut feeling doesn’t count for much in the way of evidence.

Well. Now both Bucky and Tony are mad at him – though for very different reasons - with Sam clearly having taken Bucky’s side, and Natasha’s not going to drop her questions after the way Steve practically ran away from her earlier in the morning. And that’s on top of the fact that one of the people he’s looked up to ever since he was in college _– his whole life_ – just tried to pull some kind of incomprehensible stunt on him.

Steve stifles a groan. Today is just not his day.

He checks the time. Still over an hour left until the Valkyrie reopens. He has a constant, low-level headache that isn’t going to go away anytime soon thanks to his recent almost-shouting match.

He _could_ go to sleep.

On the other hand, he does need to talk to Wanda.

He takes a moment, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose and taking slow, measured breaths. He’ll get through this. He’s dealt with people thinking much worse of him before, though he probably didn’t care nearly so much about them. Wanda doesn’t deserve to be affected by his awful mood.

After a few minutes, he gets up and washes his face, drinks some water. His reflection in the mirror looks terrible, sallow, with circles beginning to form underneath his eyes. He leans over the sink, staring at himself.

_We always stand up, Steven._

He shakes his head, the thought dissolving out of his mind like mist.

The door to Wanda’s room is already open, and he leans in the frame for a few seconds. She’s sitting on the bed, absorbed in a screen. “Hey.”

She tilts her head towards him, motioning at him to come in without taking her eyes off whatever she’s looking at. He walks over and sits down a few feet away, waiting as she finishes with whatever program she was using. “Steve,” she says, in her slightly accented voice. “What’s up?”

“Tony sent his robot out on the cable yesterday to explore the city, didn’t he?”

She looks slightly surprised. “Uh, yes, he did.”

He nods. “Have you been monitoring the feeds? I just talked to Tony, and he said he gave you the program.”

Her face brightens. “I have been checking in on them – that’s what I was doing right now. It’s pretty amazing. To find a city that’s been so perfectly preserved – well, it’s just never happened. Usually everything else we’ve found has been eroded away by the atmosphere or buried.” She pulls out the screen again and shows him a few pictures that the robot’s taken or close-ups of the city, pointing out what seems to be a marketplace, the cloth covering the stalls frozen solid and unmoving.

_\- the markets of nowhere –_

He blinks, shaking his head. One thing at a time.

“How old do you think the city actually is?”

She cocks her head. “Do you mean when it was built or when it was attacked?”

“Wha – attacked?”

She shrugs. “It is difficult to be sure, but yes. Look at the damage on these walls.” She brings up some more photos, showing him what looks uncannily like holes left by the blasters Central used to kit them with in the army, except several orders of magnitudes larger. “And see here, there was initially a glass shell around the city to retain an atmosphere, but it’s been deliberately shattered.” This time, the photos are of debris near the skull – _glass_ debris, floating like glittering stars. And he can make out a – ring, almost, like a low set wall – around the edges of the city where the glass would have formed a dome, like those built around the megacities back home.

“Tokyo,” he says almost unconsciously, and she nods, catching his drift.

“Exactly. So it’s easy enough to make out that this city didn’t fall in the usual way, which is where you see a slow migration out because resources are running dry. Another hint is that there’s evidence that they were mining organic matter and minerals in the skull itself for a lot of their daily needs, and there’s plenty left. After that, it’s just a matter of connecting the dots. It’s only been a day of the robot taking photos, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we started finding bodies once we’ve done more exploration.”

He nods, processing that. It fits with his growing theory, one that he thought was too wild to really consider but now is seeming more and more like a legitimate option. Four civilizations. Sakaar Hala, Jotunheim, and now this place. All dead. Three definitively attacked, the fourth inconclusive. “Attacked, then. When was the city attacked?”

Wanda takes a breath. “Analysis of the samples the robot’s collected say around a thousand years.”

It takes a moment for him to process that.

A thousand years.

Humans were alive then - _current human civilization_ was alive then - building cities and fighting wars and slowly but steadily inching their way towards technology that would one day give them the ability to reach the stars. And at the same time, thousands of light years away, these people were alive too, going about their own business, trading and fighting and living and dying.

Like ships in the night. So close, but so far away, never touching. Never a chance to be known.

“Son of a bitch,” he breathes.

She bites her lip. “Yeah.”

“That’s the closest we’ve gotten,” he says, adrenaline running through his veins. With every discovery, closer and closer – Hala was destroyed almost ten thousand years ago. Jotunheim around fourteen thousand. Sakaar, seven. And now this, one thousand. They’re so close he can almost taste it.

Her eyes are shining with muted excitement. “I know.”

He asks her for more details about the structure – the city, and she goes over what she’s found, showing the photographic evidence that supports it. There are more Asgardian glyphs too, along with a completely new language they haven’t seen before.

“I’ve not sent the robot inside the city proper yet,” she says. “Still doing reconnaissance around the borders. If there are any bodies, like I suspect there will be – they’ll be inside the buildings. Anything outside will have floated off by now.”

He nods, scanning over the screens thoughtlessly for a while, his mind a million miles away. “Hey, you’re going to get that robot back before we enter hyperspace, right?”

“I’ll reel it back in just before the jump.” She smiles slightly sheepishly. “There’s no deadline on this one, we can come back whenever we need to.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, let’s avoid any more near misses.” The alarm on his wrist computer goes off. He takes a moment. It’s been a long day, and its still morning. “C’mon. Wanna come with me to get our stuff from the Valkyrie?”

She grins, and lets him pull her to her feet before they head out.

* * *

(Map detailing locations of known inhabited worlds, compiled by Dr. Jane Foster onboard the Pegasus)

* * *

Lunch, right after they make the jump, is … excruciatingly awkward, despite the fact that the food’s better than usual, actual recognizable pie this time instead of dull ration packets. It’s almost worth having to sit through the meal without talking for fear of putting his foot in his mouth, though he supposes he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on seeing as how he’s been mysteriously regularly getting the best of the ration packets during their time on the Valkyrie.

The crew of the Pegasus, despite it practically being a luxury liner, is small – they didn’t want to waste time recruiting extra manpower so that they could get to the Valkyrie quickly. Consequently, it’s just Danvers, her pilot – a young woman called Monica that she points out with a fond smile – and two engineers who introduce themselves as Hope and Scott.

Danvers immediately zeroes on Sam after introductions. “So, Captain Wilson, what’re you naming the city you discovered?”

Sam looks up from his food, pausing. “Oh – Uh, I actually hadn’t thought about that. I don’t think I’m the best person to decide – discovering this place was a group effort.”

The handyman, who Jane had dragged in earlier, and is moodily poking at his food, looks up, perplexed. “It already has a name, does it not?”

“I mean,” Jane replies, “yes, it does – or it must have had one. But right now we have no idea what the locals called it.”

The handyman frowns. “Nowhere.”

There’s a momentary silence. “I’m sorry,” Tony says, leaning forward. “Nowhere??? Yeah, we are nowhere, _because humans haven’t explored this far into the galaxy yet_. That’s the idea here you know, why we’re discussing a name for it –”

The handyman scowls at him, his jaw clenching. “I meant, this place _is_ nowhere. In your language, I suppose it would be K-N-O-W-H-E-R-E. That’s its name.”

Knowhere. Huh. Steve tilts his head, watching the exchange. Is this what the handyman was trying to say, back when he found him in the lab? But wait, that would mean –

He focuses back on the conversation, the cogs in his head turning.

“That’s a stupid name -” Tony starts, looking supremely annoyed, but before things can escalate to another full blown argument, Jane cuts in exasperatedly.

“Shall we put this discussion on hold?” She looks around the room, almost daring anyone to argue.

Steve has no intention of arguing, or of saying anything really. His plan is to weather through this meal, and then go the fuck to sleep. His headache still hasn’t gone away. He’ll work on his new theory when he’s able to deal with it properly.

Tony looks almost apoplectic but shoves some of the shawarma into his face to keep himself from continuing the argument, turning to talk to Scott instead. Steve sees Danvers raise her glass to Jane silently, looking a little sheepish.

Conversation starts up again, albeit slowly, Tony engaging the engineers while Wanda starts discussing the skull-city with Jane and the handyman, who in particular looks distinctly put upon. Danvers turns to Sam to talk about his deployments, both of them comparing the changes in the since she was active. Steve tries to tune out their conversation until he hears his name.

“ – Rogers got us out of that one,” Sam’s saying.

Steve’s head jerks up, his eyes wide. Sam shoots him a look that Danvers catches onto, her eyes sharp. “Steve was your CO?”

“Uh… yeah,” Sam starts slowly, clearly catching onto the fact that there’s something more going on than he’s aware of based on whatever he sees on Steve’s face. “SHIELD contract. They usually had better training than us regular army grunts anyway.”

Danvers raises an eyebrow, looking between the two of them. “That had been my experience until recently, but now, you know what? I’m not so sure.”

Steve feels trapped. His headache is ramping up again, going from a dull accompaniment to a full-blown orchestra. He feels like he should be saying something, but doesn’t know what.

From a few seats away, Bucky coughs. “They were shit.” When Danvers and Sam turn to him, he looks down, turning slightly red. “I’m ex-SHIELD too.”

“Really?” Carol sounds overly interested. “How was your time there?”

Steve’s frozen, watching them both with a growing feeling of dread. This isn’t going to end well.

Bucky grimaces, not looking up. “Nothing worth talking about.”

She looks skeptical. “Oh come on. I know they gave you guys some cutting edge stuff to try out.”

Bucky makes a face. “Too cutting edge, sometimes. You don’t want to know, trust me.”

The feeling of dread solidifies, its tendrils winding their way up his spine, meeting the pain that’s worsening in his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Bucky worrying at the edges of his sleeve, something he only does when he's stressed too.

Sam raises his eyebrows, trying to defuse the tension he can sense building. “They trained you to be a hell of a pilot, though.”

“Perhaps,” Bucky answers, scowling at him. “But it doesn’t make up for the rest. I learnt a hell of a lot more of what I wanted to before joining SHIELD than I did during.”

Danvers leans forward. “Are you allowed to talk about it?”

Bucky huffs. “Technically yes, but I’d prefer not to.” He looks over at Steve all of a sudden, his eyes flashing with suppressed anger, too quick for Steve to look away, to pretend he hadn’t been listening, hadn't been looking. “Isn’t that right?”

The pie suddenly tastes like ash in his mouth. The pounding in his head reaches new heights.

“Migraine,” he grits out. “Excuse me.”

He practically runs out of the room.

There’s a reason he keeps moving forward, doesn’t think about his time before SHIELD, or in it – his time then was – nothing, a blank white, a field of empty snow. Not allowed, not allowed to think, not allowed to remember, or else the clack of boots, the crackle, and then the awful not-knowing, not remembering, not caring, the smooth glacial stillness as he lined up for a shot -

No. He shudders.

He will comply.

There’s a pattern here.

if he can only -

He tries to think, instead, of Sokovia, of Peggy, of anything else. His theory about the planets, about the attacks. The way Peggy’s lipstick shone in the dim lights of a bar as she smiled, tilting her head towards him; pulling her closer, feeling like he could never have been so in love –

\- the boy, leaning into him in the white room –

\- the blurred memory of Bucky’s face in the Chariot, the rasp of stubble against his hands –

The boy.

The boy in the white room, with his grey-blue eyes, and his messy hair, grinning up at him.

The one he didn’t know.

The one he knew, but didn't know and then didn't know again. The dream he kept on having, without knowing why. 

The boy is Bucky.

No.

Nononono.

He staggers, leaning against the walls. There’s a roaring in his ears, and his head feels like it’s going to split open with the pressure. He’s not – he’s not supposed to remember that. Any of that. He _can’t_. Already, he’s trying to block it off, trying to think about anything else -

\- Carol, saying _I was worried, you idiot_ , her face so dearly familiar for an instant and then blurring back into a stranger’s –

The pain in his head reaches new heights, spiking into an all-consuming howling, a never-ending screech. He stumbles forward blindly, the overhead lights like daggers straight to his skull. He can’t – he can’t – he can’t _see_ , his vision going black at the corners, spots dancing in front of his eyes. He has to get away, he has to think about something else.

He thinks he’s reached the corridor with their cabins and fumbles with the latch on a door, his hands shaking as he pushes it open and falls inside, tripping over his own feet, barely managing to make it to the bed before collapsing. His skull’s in a vice, growing tighter with every breath; someone’s stuck a red hot poker right in his brain _._ He knows he can’t bear this much longer before he rips apart completely.

His eyes roll back into his head. The dim cabin lights above him whirl faster and faster, stretching out into an infinite distance, right before everything turns black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are treasured :))


	7. Refraction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for standard winter soldier horribleness (no worse than in the movie)  
> I'm very excited for this chapter, so I hope you guys like it!!

## Now: Refracted

He blinks his eyes open. The room is dark, the bed comfortable. Beside him there’s a shadow, a steady even breathing.

He drifts off.

Later: a soft murmuring.

“ - had a migraine - ”

“ – wasn’t waking up at all - ”

“ – checked, everything seems to be okay - ”

“ – him sleep it off, probably - ”

“ – why it had to be in _my_ room - ”

The words float in and out of his consciousness, not carrying any particular meaning. He feels fragile, worn through. Like a cloth run through the laundry too many times, right on the edge of fraying apart. Time passes, though it’s difficult to keep track.

Slowly, he surfaces.

Like before, the cabin is dark, the lights powered down.

He lets himself blink slowly in the relative peace. What a shitshow. The last thing he remembers is stumbling into a room after lunch, collapsing onto the bed. He’s falling apart for no reason, right when his team may need it the most. What a fucking mess.

In the silence and the shadows, takes him a while to notice the figure perched on the edge of the bed. He laboriously rolls his head to one side to look at it.

“Buck,” he manages.

Bucky’s face is stormy, even in the darkness. Steve reaches out and grabs his hand, fumbling slightly. “I’m sorry,” he gasps out, the words slipping out without his control. “I didn’t mean -”

“Shut up, Rogers.”

Steve doesn’t let go, but lets his head drop back into the pillows; his headache is – better. Not like a goddamn pickaxe anymore, but still like a decently sized hammer slamming into his head over and over again. Dimly, he notices that he’s not wearing his shoes.

“Why’re you here?” he mumbles. _Thought you didn’t want to talk to me._

“This is my room,” Bucky says after a moment, tone dangerously even.

That sends a jolt of adrenaline through him, and he finally sits up and looks around. Shit. Apparently he’d stumbled into the wrong cabin by accident when things got bad – that’s definitely not his stuff by the foot of the bed. He lets go of Bucky’s hand and scrambles to the edge of the bed, ignoring the resulting lurch of nausea. “Shit. Sorry – I didn’t realize. I’ll get out -”

Bucky watches him get to his feet unsteadily, trying to find his shoes. “Wait,” Steve hears him say, and turns around just in time to see him smooth away a wince.

“Just – fucking sit down.”

Steve blinks, but tentatively settles near the foot of the bed, watching Bucky warily. He’s fucked up. Again. It wouldn’t be unexpected for Bucky to think he’s doing it on purpose.

Bucky thrusts an arm out, holding a couple of tablets in his hand, glowering at him. “Have these. Nat got them for you; it’s been sixteen hours and you weren’t waking up.”

 _Sixteen hours?_ Jesus. That means its morning by now. No wonder he feels like he’s been run over by a truck. Which reminds him – he wordlessly grabs the meds from Bucky and gingerly makes his way over to the bathroom, washing them down with tap water before taking care of business and making his way back to where Bucky’s waiting, sitting down at the foot of the bed.

“I’m sorry for scaring you,” he starts, but Bucky interrupts him.

“That’s not - ” he starts, but then cuts himself off and sighs. Steve waits, knowing he’s got something important to say. He looks down and grimaces, a series of complicated expressions passing across his face. Finally, he takes a deep breath. “You didn’t tell me you knew Carol,” he murmurs.

Steve blinks, not quite understanding why on earth that would be Bucky’s first question. “I don’t.”

“She seemed to know you.”

Steve frowns, irritated. “Well she was wrong.” He closes his eyes as a particularly vicious spike of pain lances through his head, pushing away the memory of Danvers’ scowl, the impossible things she was saying.

There’s a second of silence, then a bitter chuckle from the other end of the bed. “What, did she try to come onto you too?” Steve opens his eyes and looks at him wildly, trying to figure out what in the hell he’s talking about – isn’t it the other way around – wasn’t _Steve_ the one who did that out of the two of them yesterday in the Chariot? Bucky continues, his soft, hoarse voice, picking up steam, still looking determinedly at the floor. “Is this what you do to everyone who tries that you’re not interested in, pretend you don’t know them anymore?”

There’s a pause, and Steve tries to figure out what to say. “I don’t -”

“Just let me finish here, okay?” Bucky squeezes his eyes shut and starts again, his voice more hesitant than Steve’s ever heard it. “You said ... you said you wanted to start over. And I was okay with that, you know. I thought it was the best that I deserved. But then you saved my life and - the thing - happened and after that you come into my room and you fall asleep on my bed, but before that day the entire time we were on the Valkyrie you don’t talk to me, you don’t look at me, and I – I just want to know why, you know. I just want to know what you’re thinking.”

Steve bows his head, feeling horrible. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I didn’t mean to – to overstep. Or fall asleep here.”

Bucky lets out an angry huff of air. “For fuck’s sake, Steve! That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it!”

Steve feels completely lost, like he’s turned around and found himself somewhere unrecognizable. He gets the distinct feeling that he and Bucky are having two different conversations. “No,” he says slowly. “I honestly have no clue what you’re talking about.”

Bucky looks up, meeting his eyes and seeing the genuine bafflement there. Slowly, his expression hardens. “I never thought you were cruel.” He pauses, drawing in a pained breath. “You told me once that you wanted to stay a good person after they changed you. Well. Look at what you’ve become.”

He heaves to his feet and strides out before Steve can respond, almost running, the door closing with a soft hiss behind him.

Steve stares at the door for a second. For a brief instant, he considers letting Bucky have the space he so obviously wants.

But since when did he run away from a confrontation?

Moving jerkily, he puts his shirt back on, his fingers almost unfeeling as he tries to do up the buttons, half stumbling into his shoes. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he runs out after Bucky, of the dark circles under his eyes, the pallor to his skin.

He looks like a ghost.

He can see Bucky’s retreating figure at the end of the corridor.

“Barnes!” Steve yells, stalking after him, almost breaking into a run. “Bucky!”

Bucky ignores him, but Steve catches up and grabs his arm, not letting go when he whirls around, looking murderous. Steve opens his mouth, knowing what he wants to say, but not how to say it. He tries anyway.

“Just –just talk to me, okay? I don’t know what I did wrong here. Are you upset about, about – the kiss? Because I’m sorry I should have talked to you first –“

Bucky’s looking at him, his stony expression slowly morphing into incandescent fury. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m –“

“Buck,” Steve says, softly, interrupting him. In a moment of clarity, it finally clicks. There’s something wrong. Carol, and now Bucky, both telling him about things he’s supposedly done that he can’t remember. The fading memories of his dreams. Either this is some big conspiracy or –

“I don’t know,” he murmurs, looking into Bucky’s eyes, trying to make him understand the depth of his sincerity. “Really.”

Bucky stills, indignation temporarily taking a back seat to wariness as he cocks his head. “What, do you expect me to believe you’ve forgotten what happened at SHIELD?”

Steve shakes his head, biting back a pained wince. “No – I remember SHIELD”

Bucky scowls. “Then what’s the problem?”

Steve takes a breath. Tries to shove away the shaky, unreal feeling of the world. If he thinks about this like a case, a project, like the mission on Sokovia where he was uncovering a way to get into an enemy base rather than into his own goddamn past, it’s easier. Less like someone’s shoving a red-hot poker into his skull. Less like he’s about to fall apart. And already, he feels much better than he did yesterday, not like he’s about to collapse at any moment. “If you’re talking about SHIELD – I don’t remember us meeting there.”

Bucky goes, if possible, goes even more tense, his arm making an aborted attempt at jerking out of Steve’s grip. “What?” He looks wild, confused. “Steve – _what_?”

Steve takes a deep breath, feeling lost, shoving the pain in his head to one side. Either Bucky is in on the same goddamn prank that Danvers is playing, or something is very, very wrong. And he has to choose here, he has to either commit to this craziness or let it go and move on. But, he’s tired. There’s nothing left for him back on earth anymore, just a world that would chase him and drag him down into the mud. All he has now is the person in front of him, the home he’s made where he is. And to move forward, he has to know where he stands. “I’m telling the truth.”

There’s something terrible happening on Bucky’s face. Steve can almost see the wheels turning in his head. He steps forward, looking into Steve’s eyes, his own expression fracturing. “Steve, he says slowly. “When do you think we first met?”

Steve blinks, the buzzing in his head crackling in and out like an old broken radio. The words are wrenched from his mouth without him consciously thinking of them. “When Sam introduced us the first day on the Valkyrie.”

The fragile fracturing thing in Bucky’s expression breaks apart. He takes a step back, shaking his head, taking deep, heaving breaths. “Tell me you’re joking. Because this isn’t funny. I’ll believe you – just - you need to say it.”

Steve trusts him. There’s no way he couldn’t. It’s written into his bones. “I’m not, Bucky , I promise.” A horrible thought crystallizes, one that’s been brewing from the moment he thought about buying into what Bucky’s talking about. “When do you think it is?”

Bucky slowly steps forward and cups his face, his expression heartbreaking. “I met you when I was ten years old,” he says hoarsely. He looks up into Steve’s eyes, and there’s such vulnerability and anger and fear there that Steve almost staggers underneath the weight of it.

Bucky takes a shaking breath. “I’ve known you for almost fifty years.”

* * *

Steve knocks on the doorway that leads to the bridge, his heart pounding. He can see Danvers in the Captains seat, lounging as she talks to Monica. At the sound, both of them look over, Danvers’ expression immediately switching from ease to controlled anger.

“Steve,” she says, neutrally. “Why are you here?”

He takes a deep breath. “Can we talk?”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “And why do I owe you a conversation?”

He takes a risk, gambles based on what she’s said, assuming it’s the truth. He imagines how he would feel if Sam came back to him years later, pretending not to know him. “Carol,” he says, trying to be as sincere as he can with the wrongness of the pretense sitting in his mouth. “Please.”

She eyes him for a moment, but nods at Rambeau, who rolls her eyes and heaves herself out of the pilot seat, walking past Steve without glancing his way.

“I don’t take being insulted lightly,” Danvers says after a moment, her tone even.

He shakes his head. “I think something’s wrong.”

“How so?”

“You’re saying that we’ve met before, right.” He waits for her nod. “I don’t remember it.”

“What do you mean, you don’t remember it?”

He shrugs, pushing away the pulsing in his head if he actually tries to remember. Focus on the present. Think of it like a case, like an investigation into one of the cover-ups he had done back on earth. “I mean, I met you for the first time yesterday. But I’ve just had another conversation that makes me believe that what I think is the truth must be wrong.”

She looks nonplussed. “Did you hit your head?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. The entire problem is that I can’t remember.”

She makes a face at that. “So... why come to me?”

He takes a breath. “I can’t trust my own mind. I don’t really remember anything before SHIELD. So I’d like it if you could tell me exactly how we met, and what you think happened to me after that.”

She shrugs. “How we met is simple enough. Those years were rough because of the Republic wars, so Central was relying heavily on SHIELD to bulk up army ranks using bond contract employees. You were assigned to my squad for a reconnaissance mission. We were tasked with scoping out a potentially habitable exo-planet when we caught sight of artificial structures on the surface.” She shakes her head, smiling slightly in remembered disbelief. “The first new home humanity finds and somebody had already been there.”

“Hala?” he asks, trying to absorb the enormity of it. The fact that she’s suggesting that _he was there_. He was there when they first found evidence of intelligent life beyond earth. The idea itself is ridiculous.

She nods. “When we saw that there were no life signs left, we landed, started to explore. It only took two days for all of us to agree that we couldn’t just hand the planet over to the government. The way I remember it, you were one of the quiet ones at that point, you just used to listen to whatever I said. You started to open up after we had been onsite for a few weeks.”

“That’s insane … it was like, almost forty years ago?”

“Thirty five, to be exact.”

Steve stands up, shaking his head, finally reaching the limits of his suspension of disbelief. “No, that’s crazy. I’m twenty-nine, I wasn’t even born when Hala was discovered. I just … I just watched a video. Of you in the capital city, talking about the Kree, about how we just missed them, about what we could learn from their ruins.”

“Steve. You filmed that video.”

That sends him reeling. Carol must see the raw shock on his face because she lets out a small chuckle, still looking mostly sad. “You had an eye for angles, composition. That video got us the publicity we needed to save the planet. And I mean, I loved the other guys but they wouldn’t have been able to put something so moving together.”

“I don’t – I don’t remember any of that.”

“It’s the truth,” she says simply. “You were at SHIELD. I’m assuming you received a variant of the Rebirth serum. They hired you out on the reconnaissance mission that led to the discovery of Hala. After, the moment we reached earth, you were escorted away by a bunch of SHIELD personnel. I thought it was for some kind of debriefing, but then I never heard from you again.”

“Something happened,” he says, trying to fit the pieces together. “They did something to make me forget.”

She leans back, looking worried. “I’m inclined to agree with you. I’m contacting Fury.”

That makes him look up from where he’s been staring at his hands, mind spinning. “You know Fury?”

She gives him an odd look, tapping at his wrist communicator. “Yeah, he thought something was off about SHIELD around nine years ago, asked me if I knew anything. I didn’t mention any names because of the confidentiality agreements, but I told him about the way one of my squad disappeared after Hala. At some point he must have gotten enough evidence to succeed with his coup and get Pierce got thrown out.”

Pierce. Something about that name makes Steve shiver, cold dread running through him, sweat prickling under his shirt. He knows – knows the facts. Pierce was the head of SHIELD for a long time before Fury ousted him.

But beyond that –

He doesn’t want to think about it.

Danvers keeps on typing into her wrist computer, looking intent. “Steve, I need you to be very specific. What do you remember about the time you were at SHIELD?”

There’s a low pounding starting at the back of his head. “Well, the army -”

She cuts him off. “No, _at_ SHIELD. What did you do during your downtime?”

The white room. The steel door.

Something is coming.

Something terrible.

He can’t –

He shakes his head numbly. “I don’t ,” he starts, and then grinds to a halt. Nails are being hammered into his skull, one by one. His brain is being pried apart with a set of pliers. The buzzing in his head has reached a crescendo, like a swarm of bees, like static elect-

“I can’t think about it,” he grits out, and finds himself already standing, the room turning blurry around him. He tries to focus on anything else, giving into the buzzing calmness that’s already become so familiar.

Aim. Fire. Reload.

He shakes his head, shifting gears to the thing he’s been thinking about the pattern in the attacks, the destruction that he’s noticed. Knowhere. Sakaar.

She looks at him warily. “Do you mean you _physically_ can’t?”

Wincing, he nods. Knowhere. Sakaar. Hala. Jotunheim. Four planets with civilizations. Stop – stop thinking about SHIELD. Don’t think about the white –

No.

Four planets. All now dead.

But not earth. Humanity survived.

What made them different?

There’s a pattern, something on the edge of his mind.

“Okay,” she says, quick on the uptake. “Do what you can to keep yourself distracted. I’ll let you know when I hear back from Fury.”

* * *

Later in the day, Carol pings him while he’s in his room, trying to distract himself by poring over the star maps, trying to fit his half-formed theory with what they know so far. So many things are missing. The translations, for one. But Knowhere? Three can be a coincidence. But four is a pattern.

He checks the message from her. She’s asked him to meet in the unused store room. He slips out and heads over, closing the door behind himself, hearing the faint sound of the lock clicking shut. “What’d Fury say?”

“Hmm,” she says. “This is odd. He told me he’s already been looking into it.” She pauses, shooting him a considering look. “And to say ‘Budapest’ into the general comms.”

He raises his eyebrows.

She makes a face. “Well, at least now I know it’s not some kind of trigger word that makes you go berserk.”

He does a double take, taking in the isolated room she brought the both of them into in a new light. “Is this why –“

“Yes.”

Well.

He’s impressed, despite himself. “What’re you going to do?”

She grimaces, looking pained. “I hate spy games. But I trust Fury. Or I did. Now, I don’t know what to think.”

Steve rubs his forehead. Now is probably a good time to mention – “I think someone in the Valkyrie crew is a SHIELD spy.”

She pauses, her eyebrows shooting up to her hairline. “Okay, I won’t question _why_ you think that. But what – you realize _now_ is a good time to mention it? After everything we’ve been discussing for the past few hours?”

“Well, you may be giving them the all-clear to kill everyone on board with that code word.”

She snorts. “I’d like to see them try.”

If he’s being honest with himself, he agrees. Danvers, he and Sam are all trained combatants, and something tells him that Bucky has some field experience of his own too. The handyman will definitely be able to hold his own if attacked – that is, unless he turns out to be the spy. Which makes him think -

The point being, they can take care of themselves.

“I’d like to get to the bottom of this as much as you do,” Danvers continues. “So here goes nothing.” She clears her throat, and taps her comms twice. “Budapest.”

They wait, both on high alert for the slightest sign of a response.

Nothing happens.

After a few minutes, he relaxes, cocking his head. “That was anticlimactic.”

“Go back to your room, Steve,” she says, looking, for the first time, tired. “But keep an eye out. I’ll figure something out.”

He nods, more grateful than words can express.

* * *

When he gets to his cabin, he flicks the lights on, mind torn in two directions. On one side is everything he’s learnt today, threatening the foundation of everything he knows about himself. But if he actively tries to remember anything more than he’s been told, the pain in his head comes back with a vengeance, and he doesn’t want to lose another half-day to unconsciousness. On the other hand is the pattern. The truth in the stars, waiting to be reassembled.

He looks up, in the middle of toeing off his shoes.

Natasha Romanoff is sitting on his bed.

* * *

## Then: Incident Ray

> _New Brooklyn Medical Records_
> 
> _Patient Name: Sarah Rogers (, nee McDonnell)_
> 
> _Patient ID: 11191920_
> 
> _Sex: F_
> 
> _Age: 40_
> 
> _Diagnosis: ~~Stage 2~~ Stage 3A lung cancer_
> 
> _Status: ~~Inadmissible for treatment (insufficient financial resources)~~ Proceeding with treatment; all further receipts to be submitted to SHIELD_

* * *

He wakes up. He’s on a bed. On a - his bed? His head is throbbing, in nauseating pulsating waves, the remnants of a buzzing like static electricity. On his bed. In SHIELD.

Wait – wasn’t he?

His head gives an extra painful lurch, and if he had the energy, he would have groaned. As it is, he thinks a sound barely escapes him.

SHIELD. Right.

Hands to the cloth, pressing up against the itchy, threadbare sheets – god, they scratch him, he can feel every individual thread pressing into his palms, the slick rough metallic glide across his skin. This time, he does groan.

How - ?

He wants to sleep. He wants to go away for a while – but the lights are on, and they are blazing right through his eyelids, lighting up the veins underneath their delicate surface. He can’t – he can’t deal with the blazing light, it seems like a physical force drilling into his head.

God, where is –

Okay so, if he wants any kind of reprieve, then the lights need to be off. But, he thinks laboriously, for the lights to be off, he needs to turn them off. And that – and that means – he has to get up. He needs to get up and walk over to the switch –

He thinks he can feel his legs, maybe if he moves –

He tumbles right off the bed onto the floor.

He thinks he whites out for a second, the jackhammer drilling into his head reaching previously unthought-of heights.

 _Help_ , he thinks weakly. There must be someone –

Help.

He takes a deep breath before the panic can overwhelm him,

Wait.

He takes a deep breath, and the breath just keeps on going, like his lungs have grown overnight, like he can feel the oxygen entering his cells and powering him up, bringing the piercing agony of his headache into even greater focus.

He groans again, rolling over on the floor. The cool tiles on his face provide the barest hint of comfort. The lights pound down on him. Okay.

Okay, he thinks.

He has to get up.

_We always stand up, Steven._

He rolls to his knees. His hands tremble as he drags himself up, inch by agonizing inch, his eyes squeezed shut, clinging to the bed frame. He has to – he has to stand up – he has to walk over to the light – but he can’t oh god, he can’t he’s going to die, right here, and he bends over and retches, bringing up nothing because his stomach is so empty, so gnawingly hungry that it circles right back to nausea and adds to the cacophony in his head, to the jittery trembling feeling running along his limbs like he’s a newborn foal.

He collapses onto the bed, heaving.

Right back where he started.

Something adds to the pounding in his head and Steve hunches over his knees as best as he can, pulling the pieces of his poor trembling limbs in towards himself, but it doesn’t help. This time it’s not only in his head.

It’s in the hallway.

Someone walking. No – running. The sharp clack of military boots outside the door, growing closer and closer, and as his head jerks up an awful feeling of overwhelming fear washes over him, making him tremble, making his heart speed up uncontrollably and his shaking hands clench down on the metal frame of his bed until his knuckles turn white.

The metal bends under his grip.

 _Please_.

The door bursts open, and somehow he knows without knowing how that it’s not who he expected – who he was afraid of - at all. The newcomer is a young guy with messy brown hair and striking blue eyes, grinning from ear to ear as he bounces over to the cot. But Steve – he knows something’s wrong here. He can feel it.

There’s something missing. Something he should know.

He stares up, frozen, his heart hammering in his chest, and he doesn’t – doesn’t know who this is.

He doesn’t know who this is.

Something’s _wrong_.

“Steve,” the guy breathes out, and Steve’s momentarily lost in the details of looking at him, the way his eyes hover somewhere between blue and grey, the stray curl of hair that damply hangs over his forehead. “You look so good.”

Steve blinks, his mind moving though molasses, still processing the color of the man’s eyes, the curve of his face. He doesn’t know him. There’s no name, no answer floating up from the murky depths of his mind. But whoever he is, he’s – he’s not supposed to be here – it’s dangerous. He has to go.

He has to get out.

“ - do you feel?”

He was saying something, having come to kneel down in front of Steve so that they’re almost eye-level, but Steve’s couldn’t follow what. He’s still feeling like he’s floating slightly apart from his body, like his senses are reaching him on a bad signal. He feels an irrational anger surge up from somewhere inside him – this guy’s not the one with a horrible world-ending headache and uncooperative limbs, and yet he’s trying to talk to Steve after barging into the room without asking, without knowing how dangerous it is. He needs to _get out_.

“He deliberately scowls as best as he can through the spinning in the room, narrowing his eyes.

For some reason, this just makes the guy smile, relaxing back into his crouch. “ – the same old stubborn – “ he starts saying, the noise fading in and out of Steve’s ears as Steve blinks at him, trying to figure out how to make the words work, push what he needs to say out into the air. “ – now that I know –“ he starts up again, his expression turning nervous, his mouth scrunching to one side, “stop me, okay?”

Steve blinks at him, frowning slightly, his head dipping before he’s able to right it, and the boy smiles.

And then - hands.

Hands, cupping this face, tilting his face up ever so slightly, and the pounding in Steve’s heart overtakes the one in his head – there’s something missing, there’s something terribly, horribly wrong, there’s something he has to do here, something he has to remember –

And then soft lips touch his, pressing close-mouthed ever so gently, like a feather floating down onto the ground.

The boy pulls back, his expression nervous, expectant.

Like in a dream, Steve moves his hand up and swipes a finger over his own lips, chasing the remnant of what it felt like – to have someone kiss him – to have B-

And all the while, the screaming undercurrent of wrongness grows louder and louder and sets his skin crawling and sinks tenterhooks in the meat of his brain. This is – not right. This isn’t supposed to happen.

A growing terror, wrapping its freezing hands into his skin, tugging the meat of his heart, adding to the piercing pain in his skull. He doesn’t know him. This is wrong. Everything is wrong. It’s not supposed to happen like this.

There’s something terrible coming.

Something terrible is already here.

Here is what Steve Rogers thinks he knows: A stranger just burst into his room and kissed him.

Here is what he says after this, to the stranger still kneeling in front of the bed, his eyes wide with a mixture of hope and fear, his expression heartbreakingly vulnerable and soft:

“Get out.”

The stranger’s expression fractures, breaking apart for a split second before he manages to wrench it back under control, taking a deep breath, looking like he’s just been punched in the throat. “I – okay.” He nods, biting his lip, pulling back. “I’ll – go.”

Steve watches him back away, anger surging through him afresh. This – isn’t right. This is what needs to happen, but – not like this. If only he could find a way to – a way to make his head work properly, make all the words stuck in his throat line up, make his thoughts stop scattering. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want to make this stranger sad.

But right now, he needs to go.

Something terrible is coming.

The visitor pauses by the door, looking at his shoes. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought now would be the best time, you know? That’s why I waited. But I never meant - this doesn’t have to change anyth-”

He’s still not getting it. He just came in and kissed Steve, like he knew him, like Steve could look at him and say his name, like Steve knows who he is.

But he doesn’t.

Steve doesn’t know him.

And he needs to get out.

But the words – are stuck. Dropping away from his muddled brain as he scrambles towards them, growing increasingly furious at himself, at the boy, at everything.

He stops, seeing Steve’s expression, and takes a shaky breath, looking on the verge of tears. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Okay.”

He slips out.

Steve takes a shaky gasp and sways back onto the bed, the thought of following him, of even being able to exit the room out of his own will not entering his head – it’s unthinkable. He has to – to wait.

He has to comply.

Time passes.

Awareness slowly seeps back into his limbs, gradually clueing him into how much brainpower he was actually operating under when he first woke up, when the – the visitor – came. And still, an empty gaping void when he thinks back to before this room, an unfilled whiteness like a field of snow.

The crack of electricity.

His mind shies away.

Some interminable length of time later, there’s another sound from the hallway. Someone walking again, but this time not the rushed running of someone worried– no this person is moving deliberately, confidently.

Maliciously.

The footsteps stop right outside Steve’s door.

And, well. If Steve though he had been scared before, it’s nothing compared to the feeling that washes over him now. His heart speeds up and a nameless, overwhelming dread washes over him. He knows, somewhere in the whiteness, that whatever is going to happen next is going to be agonizingly painful.

The door bangs open. The man standing in the entrance grins, the scar that slashes down his face stretching with the movement.

“Time for another wipe.”

And Steve knows – he knows, despite knowing nothing apart from his name and the faint echoing sense of wrongness, that if he goes quietly with this man, he will die, and there will be nothing left of him, of all of his hope and dreams and plans and feelings and self, except the horrible blank whiteness and he will be lost in it, never able to drag himself out –

And so, even though the newborn terror in him tells him to cower away, to comply with such strength that it drags his limbs down, chokes his throat, blurs his thoughts with panic, he fights. He screams. He hits at the man with all of his impossible new strength.

In the end, it doesn’t make a difference.

More guards pour in through the doorway, pinning his arms back with large metal cuffs, placing a muzzle around his face so he can’t make a sound, dragging him down the an endless maze of corridors until they come to yellowed room, technicians in lab coats bustling along the wall, all of them giving a wide berth to the open space in the middle in which stands a chair with a halo.

They rip him out of the cuffs and muzzle and shove him into the chair. The restraints snap into place around his wrist and ankles, and he feels someone tighten the improvised belt they found around his chest. He can feel a bruise forming around one eye, and the pain across his chest is familiar, the same echoing metallic pain as when he broke a rib coughing too hard and his mam patched it up as best as she could –and –

Oh.

Oh god, he remembers.

God forgive him.

This is what was coming. The horror waiting in the shadows, in the corners of his own mind. They did this to him, making him walk into the chair the first time voluntarily, telling him it would make him stronger, faster, telling him he would finally be able to breathe, and he was so innocent, so enamored by the idea, so blind to what they actually intended to do that he went as quietly as a lamb.

And then they erased him.

He shouts again, nearly spitting with rage, the unnatural numbness the first wipe left in his mind drowning under the force of his desperation, his fury and fear, straining against the bindings with all of the strength they gave him.

They ignore his struggles, bustling around him, piercing his arms with needles hooked up to IV bags, pulling up his vital signs on computer screens, running calibration checks on the apparatus.

There’s a hush spreading out from a corner of the room. Someone walks in from that direction, strolling calmly until he stops in front of Steve. He looks over at the techs.

“This is the second procedure, isn’t it?” His tone is eerily casual.

One of them nods timidly, and the man cocks his head at where Steve’s struggling, almost a mirror image of Steve now, though before the treatment he would have towered over him. With Steve strapped into the chair, he towers over him again.

The man – Pierce, the name slips into Steve’s mind unbidden – watches him sharply, like this is an especially interesting project demonstration. “The world needs a perfect soldier. In our hands, you’ll shape the century.”

Steve feels incandescent with rage, like he could break his own bones getting out of the restraints and then fucking eat away the smile on the smug bastard’s face, rip out his eyeballs and claw out his intestines. “You piece of shit.” He spits out, straining against the metal so hard he feels a bone in his wrist give way.

They made him forget. They made him forget his own mother. The sweetness of her face, the strength she gave him. They took away his home. They took away the reason he agreed to sign up for SHIELD.

They took Bucky.

Pierce’s expression doesn’t change. “Wipe him.”

Steve screams at him in wordless rage, feeling one cuff give way, straining towards Pierce as the man calmly steps back, feeling rather than seeing a horde of guards swarm around him, holding him down, and then he hears the whirr of the machine starting above him, and his eyes involuntarily flick up to where the rig is descending down and down and _down_ and he yells more, hoping desperately that someone, that anyone, that Bucky will hear him in some way, that someone would show the slightest hint of mercy and stop this, but then in the final last horrible seconds the machine clicks into place around his head and there’s a great surge of electricity

And

Everything

Goes

A̸̦̘̩̪͛̄̀͟͞͝w̶̨̱̭̮̹͔̝̳̘̾̎̾͑̑̎͘a͙̺̮̰̻̓͊́͋̊̚̚̕y̡̹̞̥̖̆͋̽̔ ̧̣̱̺̻͔̦̔͂͛̋̎̄͢

* * *

Later:

Aim. Fire. All the bullets hit the center of the target. Reload.

Again.

He senses Rumlow behind him, monitoring as always. It doesn’t bother him. Nothing can bother him, can shake him out of the glacial calmness that’s sunk down to his very bones. This is simple. This is easy.

Aim. Fire. Reload.

Someone new enters the range. It isn’t of his concern, and there’s no falter in the rhythm of his firing. Rumlow says he should remain peripherally aware at all times though – and has tested his retention of that particular order in variety of highly effective ways, so Steve keeps a background awareness of the newcomer as the man moves to the gun rack

“Move to the next variant, “ Rumlow’s voice comes tonelessly from behind him, sounding supremely bored, tapping out something on his phone.

“Copy,” Steve acknowledges with the same cool calmness, the same sense that he is doing exactly as he is supposed to. He turns around smoothly, no movement wasted and heads to the rack, letting his current weapon slot back into its designated place. Beside him, the man stiffens.

Steve selects a newer gun, easily checking for any wear, and pivots around, starting to head back towards Rumlow.

A hand grabs his wrist.

He had sensed it coming, and had analyzed the man’s movements to ascertain that he had not been planning to take any other offensive action. Conclusion: not enough of a threat to warrant incapacitation.

“Steve,” the man says – pleads, Steve notes with a clinical detachedness - “Can we talk. Please?”

“Let go,” he replies calmly, stepping back. Ten more seconds and he will use non-lethal force to return to Rumlow.

“I haven’t seen you since – ” the man starts. Steve tunes him out. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters right now except the easy pattern of aim, fire and reload. What matters after that is not up to him.

He jerks his hand out of the strangers grasp, using the precise amount of strength required to break it. The stranger lets out a pained gasp but still keeps desperately going on about wanting to talk, about leaving the range

Steve breathes in. “I have nothing to say to you,” he says, perfectly calm, his mind already moving to the next thing, he weight of the gun in his hands.

He turns around and walks back to the range.

Rumlow hasn’t even looked up from his device.

Steve settles into his firing stance.

Aim. Fire. All the bullets hit the center of the bullseye.

Reload.

* * *

(Sketch made by Steve Rogers, date unknown)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are appreciated!! <3


	8. Tinker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was getting too long so I split it into two - which also increased the chapter count. The starting point for this AU was the novel "Engines of God" by Jack McDevitt, and next chapter is where I borrow from my favorite part of the book. :) That being said, I hope you like this one as well!

It takes a moment for it to click.

And then he strides forward, catching Natasha by the shoulders as she stands and pinning her against the wall, towering over her. “You’re the spy.”

Her expression is calm, a hint of wariness buried under careful neutrality. She didn’t even tense when he grabbed her. “Hey, Steve.”

“Quit playing games,” he grits out. “What’d you do to me?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Stop. Lying.”

“Will you let go of me if I do?”

He cocks his head, his anger turning ice-cold. “Do better.”

She knocks her head back against the wall, grimacing. “How about this as an act good faith: aren’t you wondering why you haven’t passed out again like you did yesterday from all the _remembering_ you’re doing?”

He narrows his eyes for a moment, before he remembers. “The pills,” he says, a jolt of fear running through him. “What was in them?”

She shrugs as best as she can with him pinning down her upper arms. “If I wanted to hurt you I could have a dozen times by now. So, are you going to let me go?”

He tries to judge from her face if she’s lying, but for once she’s inscrutable. Or maybe she always was, and just showed him what she wanted to see.

But. What she said is true. She could have hurt him a hundred times by now and he would have been none the wiser. She’s been one step ahead of him the entire time. He’s not going to get anywhere unless he plays by her rules.

He lets go and backs away two steps, holding his palms up slightly, showing her where his hands are. Like a flicker, too fast for him to be sure, what looks like a metallic disk retracts back into her sleeve with a twist of her fingers. She looks at him with a slight smile.

“The pills,” he reminds her tersely.

“They stopped you from healing.”

“… You poisoned me?”

Her mouth twists. “Well… no. Or not exactly.”

He raises his eyebrows at her, waiting.

She sits down on the edge of the bed, looking like she’s searching for words. “Let’s just say I know enough about your metabolism to know that it would have turned out bad. After Barnes and Danvers triggered your memories, you started healing too fast, and healing wrong. Like a wound scarring over a bullet without it being taken out.”

He draws in a breath, understanding. “So you slowed it down.”

“Yes, Rogers. Now sit down, you’re giving me a headache, having to stare up at all of that.”

Gingerly, he settles down at the foot of the bed, keeping a fair distance between the two of them. “That’s why I haven’t had more flashes either.”

She quirks an eyebrow. “You’re catching on.”

He feels some of the tension bleed out of him. The real question, though, still remains. “Okay, so even if I believe that you’re here to help. What did SHIELD do to me?”

“That,” she says, musing, “is a long story.” She pauses for a minute and looks almost surprised when she raises her head and sees Steve’s glaring at her. “I never liked explaining.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Oh, if _that’s_ the issue. Is there some sort of file you can give me if you can’t be bothered to explain?”

She snorts. “File? Do you think I’d risk carrying any proof I wasn’t who I said I was?”

Something clicks into place, and an entirely new wave of panic threatens to overwhelm him. “Shit – you were never trained as a linguist were you? Did you screw with the translations?”

She goes still, stopping the swinging of her legs against the side of the bed, sending him a withering look. “No, Rogers. I’m _very_ good at my job.”

“But you’ve never studied Sakaarian-”

“I know seven languages and I’ve carried out operations on every continent. Just because I didn’t happen to know Sakaarian a week before I boarded doesn’t mean I know how to cobble together a working translation.”

He’s still not a hundred percent convinced. Tomorrow, he’s going to ask Wanda and Jane to go over the translations with him once. The idea that such important work was in the hands of someone without any actual experience in the field is somehow temporarily more terrifying than the fact that his memories have been screwed with.

But that thought brings him back to –

“What did SHIELD do to me?”

She grimaces. “Like I said, good question. That’s what I was sent here to find out.”

That makes him stop in his tracks. “I’m sorry, what?”

“How much do you know about Fury’s coup of SHIELD?” Another non sequitur. He decides to play along.

“I was out on a rotation in the Colonies when it happened, so not much.”

“That… makes sense, actually.” She grimaces. “People in the building that day know it came to weapons being drawn in headquarters. Fury eventually got the upper hand, but Pierce retaliated by locking us out of most of the servers before he was kicked out. We had no idea about any of the things Pierce did until you and Carter came through.”

That makes him double-take. “What – me and Peggy?”

She looks at him, wryly amused. “Do you remember that bill both of you got passed in Central about six months ago? The one that mandated the release of information-”

“The one that put me solidly on Central’s shit-list? Yeah, I do happen to remember that one.”

“Well,” she says. “That bill meant that as a collaborator with Central, Pierce's estate had to release his personal data – at least to us. Even the parts he had wanted to hide. And some of it was about you.”

“But – that’s absurd. Are you saying SHIELD had _none_ of my records from before until the data dump?”

“Like I said, it wasn’t a friendly takeover. He destroyed our archives on his way out, refused to give us access to the backup servers. We were barely left with your contract ending date. And plus, it’s not like you said anything interesting to us or raised any red flags when we came around asking.”

“Why would I?” he says thoughtlessly, and then frowns.

“Exactly,” she says, shooting him a wry smile. “So when it was time for your release, we let you go without looking twice, processed you like anyone else. SHIELD even made you a new ID because we thought Pierce had trashed the old one like he did for all the other bond contracts.”

He thinks about the documents he submitted in his college application, the newness of them, the sense of detachment he felt about the person they described. At the time, he had thought it was what he had seen and done in the army that was making him feel like that, one step removed from himself, everything seen through a plane of fogged up glass. Like something was wrong with the world. Just _slightly_ off. The way he had dealt with it – continued to deal with it - was to keep moving forward. Stay in the present and work towards the future.

In hindsight, he can admit the irony.

Natasha continues speaking, forcing him to stop his train of thought, her tone going abruptly serious. “Five years later, when thanks to your work we finally got access to Pierce’s files and started mining the data, we saw a particular subject popping up repeatedly in highly confidential files – files which talked about the less than legal deals that SHIELD carried out under his direction – the assassinations, the seeding of chaos for Central, the destabilizations of border countries. _Way_ too repeatedly, for over _thirty years_. In most of the files the subject was referred to as Asset R01.”

Steve feels the blood drain from his face. He – he knows that name. He’s not sure how, but he does. An immense, unshakable feeling of dread rises up in his chest, settling alongside the fear and anger. There’s a sense of faint pressure in his head – nothing like the world-ending headaches he had yesterday, but he doesn’t doubt that without the meds it’d become one.

Asset R01. Something about that is – not good.

Bad.

_Something terrible is already here._

Natasha looks sympathetic, but continues relentlessly, each word falling like a blow.

“It took us a while to figure out what had become of R01. It seemed like he had disappeared. Until we found a file from the very beginning. The first subject for a revolutionary program they were developing for Central that would – if it succeeded - mean that humans would never have to age, never have to suffer.” She looks at him, waiting for him to understand.

“Rebirth,” he breathes out. It feels like the room is shaking around him, but he distantly realizes he’s the one who’s trembling. Carol, telling him he must have received some variant of the serum. Bucky saying he’s known him for half a century.

Steve Rogers. Twenty-nine years old. Grew up in New Brooklyn – somewhere. Joined SHIELD because he wanted to make a difference. Left disillusioned after his contract was up, and threw himself into the one thing that made sense. Only, how much of his remembered life has he spent sleepwalking through his dreams? The video that struck a chord – apparently he was the person who filmed it. The cases that he fought – turns out they unlocked his own secrets.

How much of what he knows is a lie?

Natasha gives him a small smile. “Yes. The first test subject of the Rebirth program. Rebirth Zero One. A twenty-something year old with multiple health conditions, but a mind for strategy that was making even the top brass sit up and look. And you know what the name on the file was?”

He knows. He knows. All the pieces are falling into place in one horrible jigsaw puzzle.

“Steve Rogers,” Natasha says.

The final piece aligns. Everything goes awfully, completely, still.

It’s him.

He is – or was – Asset R01. He’s helped SHIELD for over thirty years.

She continues, ruthlessly, like once the story’s started it has to reach its end, no matter what the revelations in between do to the listeners.

“And we thought – surely not. Surely this can’t be _that_ Steve Rogers, paragon of truth and justice, savior of Sokovia, surely not someone so public, so exposed.”

“But it was,” a voice comes from the doorway, and Steve’s head whips around, and he sees Bucky standing there, looking tired but _alive_ , so wonderfully unbelievably _here_. Natasha doesn’t startle an iota, not moving her gaze from Steve’s face as Bucky comes over and settles right next to Steve, so close their thighs press against each other. He takes Steve’s hand. “The biometrics matched. And let me guess,” Bucky says quietly. “This is also when you found about Asset 17.”

“Yes,” Natasha replies, equally somber.

“I got the Rebirth serum too,” Bucky starts, his voice hoarse and halting as he explains to Steve. “A slightly different version. Both of us were test subjects. I was number 17, entered the program some time after you. Your version focused on healing, mine was… endurance. But both of us stopped aging after we got it. Or we didn’t age the same way.”

Natasha nods. “There’s evidence that they went overboard with the earlier versions. Foster and Danvers received the final product and have got, what, probably fifty extra years at peak capacity? But the first test subjects – well, I wouldn’t be surprised if both of you were functionally immortal.”

Steve’s eyes widen. He stares at her.

She winces. “It’s a theory. Klein showed me a memo from Pierce’s files saying they needed to tone down the regenerative abilities or the recipients would be out of control. He didn’t like the idea of Central getting its hands on an army of immortal unkillable soldiers, even if he was fine with having his own.”

Bucky’s gone tense beside him. “Small mercies.”

Steve turns to him. “You knew about this? That we – we’re not going to die?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “We can still die, Rogers, given enough damage. I think. But we’re probably not going to get older.”

“So – why didn’t I see you all those years then. Was R01 –was I the only subject they used? And why don’t I remember?”

“They didn’t need me,” Bucky says softly. “Not when they had you. SHIELD was never about brute force, they were always the scalpel, shaping history from behind the scenes. One super soldier was enough for them. But I was too valuable to give up and volatile to leave unattended. So they froze me.”

Steve’s heart stops and he grips Bucky’s arm with so much force that his knuckles go white. “What- what do you mean, froze you?”

Natasha takes over, the roaring in Steve’s ears making her voice difficult to hear. “SHIELD ran a series of cryofreeze experiments to test tissue preservation. Barnes had a higher than average healing capacity and was able to recover from the damage the initial freezing trials did to his cells. He made, according to them, the perfect subject. After, it’s anyone’s guess. Maybe they just wanted to see how long he would last.”

Bucky huffs, his eyes pressed shut. His voice is hoarse. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t remember a lot of the freezing itself. They told me it was because of damage to my short term memory centers because of the ice. But I don’t know why _you_ don’t remember. As far as I know, you were awake for all thirty six years of your contract. ”

Steve cannot fathom the meaning of that number. Thirty six years. Right now, his concrete memories amount to a measly seven or eight. A couple of years of what he now realizes is the tail-end of his time in SHIELD. Then college, then working to save Tony in Sokovia, then fighting with Peggy to bring down Central. And after that, the far reaches of space. The Valkyrie. Here.

There’s this living, unremembered person inside him who was alive for much longer than the person he is now.

The idea is terrifying.

Natasha continues. “I thought you remembered too, until I talked to you and you were exactly who you seemed to be. A good man. But there was something in R01’s – your files that we could never figure out that may be able to explain it. The Chair.”

There’s no perception of his own movement. He’s somehow on his feet, backing away from the bed. “Don’t - ” he chokes out, his entire body feeling like a live wire. The door’s – behind him. He can still get away, it’s just two of them. And then ten more hostiles in the ship. Anything, anything not to go to the Chair again.

Anything.

Please.

But what then. Where does he go then. This is a ship – a fucking spaceship in hyperspace. He’s trapped, he’ll never get away, never, however much he runs, and they’ll drag him back to the restraints screaming and strap him in and then –

One of the techs in front of him stands up slowly, holding their hands out. “Steve,” the tech says gently, like talking to a spooked horse – and that’s. That’s not right.

No one talks to him gently, stretches towards him looking worried. He is – he is a machine. He is SHIELD’s righteous soldier. He is a regular human being. He is –

The tech steps forward, looking devastated.

The tech’s –

Bucky.

Steve gasps, feeling like he’s broken the surface after an eternity spent underwater. God, what the hell was that – what the hell did he just remember.

Bucky’s staring at him warily. “Steve. Do you know where you are?”

He draws in a breath. “Yeah,” he says shakily. He can still feel the fear running through him like a bolt of electricity, even though the details are draining out of his consciousness again. That was – horrible. A loose, shaky feeling of unreality, a bone deep terror. Is that – is that what he’s missing? Is that what they did to him?

“I guess that answers the question,” Natasha says a little ruefully from behind Bucky.

Bucky growls out a curse. “Keep talking.”

Steve draws towards Bucky, sitting back on the bed. Bucky leans into him slightly, and Steve treasures the warmth, the nearness of him, leaning back and letting him wrap an arm around his shoulders. 

She nods, switching gears, making sure that he’s following. “Pierce was smart. He hid you among the other normal bond contract employees whenever you were off-mission. Fed you a believable backstory to avoid raising suspicions whenever you talked to someone. Your cell was like any other. And after the coup, when Fury’s staff came around creating new records to replace the ones we had lost, you just told them what you had been taught.”

“I thought it was the truth,” Steve breathes out.

“You had been trained to say nothing that would set off any alarms,” she replies seriously. “Pierce used to update the identity he gave you every few years with a new date of birth and basic background information. You just told the staff the latest one. And that’s who you became.”

Steve frowns. “But that doesn’t explain you,” he says to Bucky. “You remembered. Didn’t you let them know something was wrong?”

“I was still frozen for a couple of years after you were released,” Bucky says. “And when Fury’s people found my tube and unfroze me, I just wanted to get out of there. I spent a lot of time getting interrogated by this guy Clint – ”

“Wait – _Barton_?”

Bucky shoots him an odd look. “Yeah. But I didn’t want to tell them shit. SHIELD was the same, no matter who’s at the head in my book. They didn’t get anything out of me, and once they saw that my contract was up they had to let me go. Simple as that.”

Natasha coughs, looking morbidly interested. “Both of you know I’m going to have to report this in, right?”

Steve glares at her. “You don’t have to do anything.”

“I like the sound of that.”

Bucky looks up at her, narrowing his eyes. “But why send you here? Why not corner us on Earth after you uncovered the files?”

She sighs. “You overestimate our timeline. We put all of this together just weeks before the Valkyrie was supposed to leave. And at that point taking Rogers in for an interrogation would just add to media storm around him, which is the last thing we wanted. And you were entrenched deep in SI. The best way to get information on both of you together was here. And, well. An indefinite mission with two products of Pierce’s Rebirth program – one who was probably the most decorated dark ops soldier the world had ever seen –travelling with the head of the most powerful corporation in the world and earth’s most famous scientist – who _also_ happened to be another product of the Rebirth program via Central. Captained by a Central soldier whose allegiances may not have been what they seemed. You have to admit, it does sound like a conspiracy. Fury needed an in.”

“So you became the linguist.”

She smiles, one side of her mouth pulling up. “Poor Natalie Roman. I’m sure her Academy training was very good.”

Both of them stare at her in disbelief.

She smirks briefly, then gets to her feet in one smooth movement. "Well then, boys. My work here is done.”

“Wait - what’d you mean _done_?”

She raises her eyebrows. “The code: Budapest. Time to come clean; full disclosure. You’re welcome.”

Bucky’s expression turns murderous. Steve doesn’t blame him. “What about the rest – the messages, for one. And how do we know you don’t have a hidden agenda you’re not telling us?”

“That,” she says with relish, “is my business. Keep taking the pills every twelve hours,” she adds, and her tone has flipped to businesslike in under a second. “That should prevent you mind from burning itself up while allowing it to heal.”

He eyes her. “Okay.” Before he can take a breath to interrogate her further, she throws him one last smile and slips out of the room faster than he can blink.

He stares after her, open-mouthed.

Well.

He’s got a lot to think about.

* * *

(first variant of Rebirth serum developed by SHIELD)

* * *

A while later, Bucky shifts, peeking at him out of the corner of his eye. “So,” he mumbles, staring at the floor. “You remember anything else?”

Steve shakes his head. “No.” He feels Bucky hunching in on himself further. “Hey,” he says softly. “It’s okay. Natasha says it’ll come back eventually, the memories just needed a trigger.”

“Do you still want me to be here?”

“What?” Steve says, nonplussed. “Buck, of course I do.” A horrible thought strikes him. “Do you… do you want to go? I mean, I know I messed up -”

Bucky shakes his head, starting to worry at the edge of his sleeve. “No, stop. It’s not that, It's just - I’d understand if you don’t want me to be here, you know.”

Steve feels more lost than ever. “Why on earth would I want that?”

“I didn’t realize,” Bucky says after a moment, and his voice sounds raw. “I was so caught up in the fact that I thought you didn’t want me that I didn’t see what they were doing to you. I didn’t see that you didn’t know who you were.”

Oh.

Steve knows, a little, of what Bucky’s talking about, after their halting, stammering conversation in the corridor, full of uncertain pauses and charged pitfalls. Bucky was short on the details, but the gist was that they knew each other well before SHIELD, and then when they were in SHIELD Bucky had – made a move on him - kissed him, apparently, if what Steve had been able out of Bucky’s mumbles and evasions had been right. Except Steve had quite clearly shut whatever he had started down.

He still remembers none of this.

But.

He thinks he dreamt of it, a little. It’s there, on the edges of his brain, like a shimmering afterimage of hyperspace, just out of reach.

He must have thought about it a lot, for it to have survived whatever they did to him.

But he’s here now. And he still doesn’t remember any of those long blank years, still thinks instinctively that he’s exactly what he’s been led to believe. And who knows, a more skeptical, less trusting person might have rejected what Carol, what Bucky and Natasha told him, would have thought it was all a conspiracy, or a way to make him doubt his own sanity. But that’s not who he is. His faith has always been in people. In Peggy’s bright, unwavering strength. In Tony’s silver-quick mind. In Sam, and his honest heart. In Carol Danvers, a light for humanity.

In Bucky.

“Listen,” Steve says, his resolve strengthening. He slides to his knees so that he’s looking up at Bucky, taking both of his hands in his own. “It’s neither of our fault, okay? I don’t remember right now, but I know I treated you shittily back then. I don’t think I could have done that on my own, because you’re one of the kindest, smartest, most amazing people that I’ve known. So maybe it was after they erased me. But I don't know for sure. So I don’t blame you for trying to protect yourself from how I acted then.” He waits for a few seconds, willing Bucky into believing him, to stop him from falling back into hating himself for not seeing what he couldn’t have known.

“And even if I wasn’t in my right mind it doesn’t change the fact that I did it, and it hurt you. And I won’t hold it against you if you want to take a step back. Hell, maybe when I start remembering all of that I’m going to start thinking that _you_ don’t want me because of all the ways I was cruel. But I don’t know who I’ll be after I get my memories back. I don’t know who I was, without you. I just know who I am now. And you know what I think?”

Bucky darts his eyes at him and manages a shake of his head, pressing his lips together.

“I think,” Steve says softly. “We’ve lost enough time. They took thirty years from us. I’ll be damned if we lose a minute more.”

Bucky smiles slightly helplessly at that, flicking his eyes up to meet Steve’s for a brief instant. “That’s how you see it?”

Steve smiles back, squeezing his hands. “That’s how it is,” he says firmly. After a moment, he moves up to sit beside Bucky again.

They sit in silence comanionably. Steve’s still has Bucky’s hands in his own and quietly marvels at the simplicity of it, the interplay of light across his fingers. He doesn’t know where this newly-fragile thing between them is going. He even doesn’t know where it started.

But he has today. He has Bucky _here_ , and he’s not going to waste it.

“I should go,” Bucky mutters after a few minutes, drawing his hands away. “You need to get some rest.” He starts moving as if to leave, and – Steve’s hand shoots out almost instinctively, coming to a stop on top of Bucky’s wrist.

“Stay,” Steve says, and he can feel his face heating up. But he knows. He knows in his bones that this is okay, this is alright to ask of him.

Bucky’s expression goes raw and surprised for a split second before he narrows his eyes. “Just because we’ve made up doesn’t mean I’m going to fall into your arms, Rogers.”

“Not like that,” Steve rushes to say, trying to convey his earnestness. “Just – you can sleep here. The bed’s got plenty of room.”

Bucky tilts his head at him, unconvinced.

“I don’t want to let you out of my sight,” Steve says, trying to emphasize on his desperate sincerity. If he has to use his own amnesia to get Bucky to stick around instead of retreat into the shadows like he’s made a bad habit of doing, he’s damn well going to do it. He widens his eyes. “Can you blame me?”

After a beat, Bucky narrows his eyes. “You’re not fooling me.”

Steve huffs, closing his eyes briefly. “I’m asking here, Buck. And – I owe you,” he adds wryly. “I did fall asleep in your bed yesterday.”

Bucky scowls at him without heat, shaking his head. “That’s not how this works.”

Steve shuffles over to one side of the bed. Somewhere beneath consciousness, he knows how to get Bucky to listen. “It can, if you want it to.”

Bucky sighs, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Fine, ” he mutters, after a long minute of staring.

He’s not fooling anyone.

He shucks off his boots and climbs onto the other side of the bed, lying on his back stiffly, staring straight up at the ceiling.

Steve lies back too, rolling onto his side to look at Bucky. He thinks, suddenly, of all the things Bucky’s had to find out today right alongside him, the way his worldview must have been spun on its axis too. “Are you okay?”

Bucky scrunches up his nose. It’s kind of adorable, really, and the sight manages to distract Steve from the fact that he doesn’t answer for a minute. “Buck,” he chides.

“It’s – not easy,” Bucky says softly after a moment. “I was angry at myself for all the wrong reasons for so long. It’s not going to just - disappear.”

“There’s nothing to blame yourself about,” Steve says determinedly, the corners of his mouth pulling up a few seconds later when Bucky rolls his eyes at him. “And I’m here for however long you need.”

Bucky turns onto his side so that he’s looking at Steve, and Steve’s once again lost in the here-ness of him, the color of his eyes, the way he breathes, the slope of his forehead.

A forgotten part of him knows the preciousness of having him close again.

Bucky smiles at him hesitantly, and he feels the corners of his mouth curl up in return, and he knows, somewhere where the blankness and the white couldn't touch him, that it’s going to be okay.

They’re going to be okay.

They spend an unknowable amount of time like that, like little kids at a sleepover curled towards each other, sharing a secret no one else in the world knows.

He falls asleep between one blink and the next.

* * *

_Excerpt from private communication between Steve Rogers and Dr. Jane Foster onboard the Pegasus:_

> _Hey – would you mind going over the translations once today?_
> 
> _Yeah sure. Wanda, Don and I had been working on them yesterday_
> 
> _…_
> 
> _And everything checks out?_
> 
> _Yes_
> 
> _Why_
> 
> _Is there a problem?_
> 
> _No_
> 
> _No reason_
> 
> _We may have got another full line from the Asgardian glyphs_
> 
> _What does it say?_
> 
> _Farewell, and good fortune. Do not seek us among the stars_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments give me life! <3


	9. Hala

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm very excited about this chapter!!! The final scenes have been in my head from the moment I started thinking about this AU. So - I really hope you like it!

_The Layman’s Guide to the Galaxy, page 98_

_Section: Fa to Fi_

_Fermi’s paradox_

_Confronted with a nearly limitless universe billions of years old with an almost infinitely vast number of opportunities for life, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, sitting for lunch at Los Alamos with three colleagues in 1950, asked a question that still perplexes everyone who looks up at the night sky: “Where is everybody”?_

_Over two centuries later, the discovery of Hala was hailed as a conclusive answer to the long dead physicist’s question. And yet, the Kree died millennia ago. So did the inhabitants of Sakaar. The essence of question still remains: are we truly alone? If there are all these billions of planets in the universe that are capable of supporting life and millions of intelligent species out there – as the discovery of Hala supports - then how come none has visited earth?_

_Possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox are:_

  1. _They are (or were) here: Unexplained aircraft sightings and conspiracy theories about humans being descendants of ancient aliens all derive from this theory. The problem? There’s no proof._
  2. _They exist but have not yet communicated: This one, for the most part, may be true. Neither the Kree nor the Sakaarians were able to develop hyperspace engines that could have allowed them to communicate with or reach earth before their civilizations collapsed. But – and perhaps more concerningly – does this imply that most planetary civilizations are doomed to fail at a certain level of technological prowess from the outset? And what about (the supposedly few) other races who may have developed hyperspace technology – where are they?_



_There have been many attempts to explain the Fermi paradox, but without further galactic exploration, humanity is doomed to remain stymied for years to come._

* * *

There are two things that Steve has the option of doing. One, he can spiral into what he’s just learnt, try and dig out more about the things he did, the things they made him do. About who he was. About what they made him. But that requires resources, access to files that are on earth. And going back to earth right now is impossible, not to mention unwise. It’ll disrupt everything he and Peggy worked for.

So, he isn’t going to ignore it. He’s just going to – compartmentalize. The past is the past. It’s made him who he is, as much as most of him is unaware of it. But he can use who he is today to work towards the future. To keep moving forward. Pick up the pieces.

So that what he does,

The first order of business is the translations. Steve’s unduly impressed that everything Natasha’s done checks out, almost despite himself. He’s not going to make the mistake of not trusting her capability again.

And now, on top of the treasure trove they risked their lives to unearth on Sakaar, they have the new Knowhere pictures to factor into the mix, the new fragment Jane put together from them while he was talking to Carol and Natasha.

_Farewell, and good fortune. Do not seek us among the stars._

Pretty definitive, as statements go. Perhaps the Asgardians didn’t want the Sakaarians to follow them back to their home planet. But it presents more questions than it answers.

For one, it doesn’t line up with the message in the signal broadcasting from Knowhere: an invitation to trade is pretty much the antithesis to being asked not to be followed. And both messages were left by the same Asgardian. But, as is becoming increasingly clear, Knowhere isn’t where the Asgardians lived. Wanda’s hypothesis is that the abandoned city was a waystation of sorts. An interstellar port for weary travellers.

So. One more piece to the puzzle. The jagged edges that Steve’s been running over again and again in his mind, waiting for them to line up. He knows there’s more to it. Jotunheim, decimated, and evidence of the Asgardians being the ones responsible. Sakaar in ruins and Asgardians glyphs in an ancient temple buried underneath millennia of sand. In the temple, two messages in Asgardian script, half translated and seemingly in direct contradiction with one another, one leading to a trading city, one asking not to be sought out.

Knowhere, the trading city, nearly demolished. At a later date than all the other civilizations they’ve found, but destroyed either way. And Hala – the only exoplanet with no visible connections to the Asgardians, dead all the same. The Sokovian world was uninhabited when humanity found it, and there was nothing that could have survived on the surface to have been destroyed.

Four civilizations. All dead. Three linked to the Asgardians.

Did the Asgardians destroy them?

And if so - why was Earth spared?

Steve looks at the maps. It doesn’t make sense. Earth is bang in the middle of Sakaar, Hala and Jotunheim. And if the Asgardians were on their spree of destruction as recently as a thousand years ago, humanity would have been right in its path.

He, Jane and Wanda take over the lounge of the Pegasus to work on the translations, converting it into a new makeshift lab, covering the walls with printouts, taking up the couches. When Steve’s spent five hours in the lounge without taking a break, his head buried in the newest set of potential symbol representations, Bucky comes in and shoves a mug of tea at him, manhandling him to one side of the couch before sitting down beside him and opening his latest novel.

Steve hides a smile as he raises the tea to his lips.

It’s nice, this growing thing between them. Neither of them want to speed up – too much has been left unsaid or unremembered, and they still have all of the missing years between them to untangle. But, Steve would rather face Central head on than take a step back either. So, for the moment, they have this: a quiet companionship, the knowledge that it could become more, when they’re both ready.

Natasha wanders into the room with them after dinner, having explained away her sudden unwillingness to participate as a case of the flu to the people she hasn’t told her secret. She’s promised Steve she’ll let everyone else know once they’re planet-side.

Steve’s holding her to her word.

“Why’re you here?” Bucky mutters in her direction when she settles down on the opposite couch, too low for the others to hear.

“Doing my job,” she shoots back, giving Steve a wink.

Steve shakes his head exasperatedly.

Late at night, just before they’re due to exit hyperspace, the handyman knocks, telling them all that Danvers has told them to strap down before re-entry. He stops and stares over Steve’s shoulder, looking at the inscription on Jotunheim. They’ve got a couple more words down. It’s definitely a warning of some kind – which is along the lines of what they were expecting, but the details are frustratingly vague. There’s a suffix that has always been attached to locations, and Jane thinks the root word means Jotunheim, but they don’t have enough evidence to be sure.

“How is the work progressing?”

Steve shrugs, cracking his neck. “Not bad. It’ll take some time, but we’ll find the Asgardians yet.”

Above him, the handyman hums, sounding perturbed.

They secure themselves and wait for the countdown, exiting eight hours away from the planet. It’s impressive, for a pilot – but nowhere near Bucky’s level of skill. In any case, it gives them just enough time to get a night’s rest before landing on Hala.

The planet that Steve’s been on before apparently, in another life.

He wonders what he’ll find there this time.

* * *

Steve watches through the windscreen of the revived Valkyrie as the planet grows larger and larger before them, the curve of its red sun casting the surface into shadow. An hour ago, they started the engines and unhooked from the Pegasus so that both ships could land separately at the colony.

He knows logically, that he’s been here before, but he doesn’t remember any of it, doesn’t feel any sort of emotion as he stares down at the oceans and clouds of the approaching planet.

What he actually remembers is this: the soft rasp of the pages of his book, the sketches he made. The pictures he spent hours copying, getting the shading just right. Towering temples, breathtaking marvels of architecture. The papers he read about the translations of inscriptions archeologists continued to excavate that helped earth develop its own quantum supercomputer a decade ahead of schedule. Even after they died, the Kree lived on in a way, if only in their influence over the lives of humans.

The Kree had been proud, aggressive. A race of warrior-scientists with a strong military discipline. The inscriptions described a species that lived and died by the dictat of their deity, an immensely powerful supercomputer whose name translated best into ‘the supreme intelligence’. And then one day, the supreme intelligence gave them instructions, told them to do something that their society could not conceptualize. And war broke out between two factions of the Kree, one of which wanted to listen to their god, and one that would not.

Apparently whatever the supreme intelligence told them had been so taboo that there were no records of it even in the Kree archives. It was the second most well-known mystery about extraterrestrial civilizations that humanity had encountered, after the Jotunheim statue.

Or it was, until now. Steve thinks Knowhere might give it a run for its money.

Most academics believed that this conflict was the one that had completely wiped out the Kree, leaving no survivors. But there were some that believed that it was simply impossible for that magnitude of destruction to be intentionally caused by its very inhabitants.

Steve didn’t think it mattered, really. They were dead either way. But now –

He’s not sure.

The Valkyrie dips below the clouds, and Steve sees his first – hundredth – glimpse of the surface. The shining spires of the remains of the capital city gleam in the rising sun.

A few miles away from the city is the human colony, buzzing with activity. Even from this high above the surface, Steve can see the telltale black specs of quinjets, the blocky canvas structures that outlasted their expiration dates. On Sokovia, almost everyone lived underground. But there’s still something unmistakably – human, about the outpost that Steve recognizes that settles into his bones like coming home.

* * *

Sam and Bucky oversee the Valkyrie’s landing at the flat stretch of ground marked out at the edge of the colony, and then join the others near the loading bay, all of them waiting for Sam to lower the ramp. Without a sound, Bucky sidles up beside him as at the back of the room Sam hits the lever.

The ramp creaks down. They look out at the rising sun of another world.

The first thing he notices when he steps on the ground is that the gravity’s noticeably stronger – it feels like there are small lead weights attached to every limb. Oxygen levels seem to be slightly higher too. Otherwise, it could be any sunrise on earth, except for the bitter, acrid tang to the air. Like dust and smoke and ocean salt. Steve’s hit by a wave of déjà vu so strong he almost stumbles.

He knows that smell. The feel of army fatigues against his skin, the evenly spaced thuds of a marching platoon. Blankness – but also, a sense of wonder, scraping away at it.

He’s – he’s been here before.

Danvers – Carol – is looking at him worriedly, having walked over from the Pegasus. “You doing alright?”

“Yeah,” he breathes out, hunched over slightly. “Just – it’s weird. I remember the way the air smells. But nothing else.”

She smirks. “Unique, isn’t it?”

His mouth pulls to one side. “Definitely.”

The buzzing in his head grows louder. Behind him, he can sense Bucky tensing up, unsure of his welcome if he intervenes.

Carol comes over and puts a hand on his back. “Check in, alright Steve? I have to handle stuff I missed while I was on our rescue mission. But I’d like to know you’re doing okay.”

“Sure,” he manages. He brings up a genuine smile, straightening up and pushing the headache down with no small effort. “Thanks, Carol.”

She grins. “Same team, remember? I’ll be seeing you.”

Steve watches her walk over to Sam to deal with the formalities. He turns to Bucky, who’s biting his lip.

“Are you okay?” Bucky asks hesitantly, looking nervous.

“Yeah.” He looks around to where the rest of the crew of the Valkyrie is ranging out, Tony leading them towards the tents and squat buildings of the colony. “You don’t need to worry,” he says.

When he turns back towards Bucky, he’s looking exasperated. “You’re literally recovering from SHIELD stealing your memories.”

He shrugs. “And when they come back, I’m sure it’ll bother me more.”

Bucky makes a face, but doesn’t argue. He follows him as he starts to head towards the colony.

A grizzled lady who introduces herself as Maria Rambeau directs them to a dilapidated warehouse near the loading ground to use as their temporary base. They aren’t exactly equipped for guests here – he’s surprised they have any space to spare at all. Steve suspects that the crew will end up sleeping in the Valkyrie anyway.

It’s not the only surprise Maria has in store for them.

“Since y’all are here on an independent research expedition,” she says, tapping her wrist computer, “we’re giving you access to the stuff we’ve found so far while you’re on the planet. Usually we tell Central or SHIELD funded teams to fuck right off but Carol trusts you to not pass off anything you figure out from our data as your own.”

Jane looks overjoyed, and Steve can’t help but share the feeling. They’ve just gotten free access to literal decades of research people on Earth can only dream of.

Which means –

He can investigate. He has his nebulous, unformed theory – more of a conspiracy than anything at this point. But all he’s missing are a few of the last pieces.

Here, with the central temple in the city, the data the researchers have gathered –

It may just confirm everything he’s been thinking of.

And he can go there now. The temple’s less than ten miles away.

“Hey,” he asks Maria. Do you mind me borrowing a Chariot to take into the city later today?”

Maria raises an eyebrow at him. “Knock yourself out. They’re preprogrammed not to go off the trails.”

He shrugs. “Won’t be a problem.” He looks over at Bucky, who’s staring at him, looking confused. “You want to come?”

Bucky looks at him for a few seconds, no expression on his face at all. “Sure,” he says eventually. “But I’ll drive.”

* * *

Hala’s come a long way from Danvers’ discovery of the crumbling ruins of the outer temple decades ago. Years of careful excavation and restoration after those earlier blundering attempts unearthed the full glory of the city, surprisingly intact for the millennia of exposure to the elements it had endured. Nowadays, you could drive down the main boulevard and walk into the restored ruins of a Kree schoolhouse.

But he’s not interested in looking at a schoolhouse. Not today.

The colony’s Chariots are slightly smaller, but when it’s just the two of them it hardly makes a difference. Steve spends the ride into the city in the passenger seat, occasionally looking out at the marvels of the city, he skeletal remains of the overhead rail, but mostly watching Bucky, the line of his cheekbone, the small crinkles near his eyes, the way all of him fits together into something fond and familiar, something newly made and unexplored.

“Quit staring at me,” Bucky mutters after a few minutes, a faint blush rising up beneath his skin.

A corner of Steve’s mouth quirks up. “Can’t help it.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “What’d you know anyway? I can’t do anything with you like this – it’d be like I’m taking advantage.”

Steve feels overly wounded at that. “I’m thinking fine now. I don’t need to remember to make this work.”

“And what about that lady you got waiting for you on Earth?”

He sucks in a breath, feeling like he’s been punched. Strangely enough, he never expects how hard thinking about her is. It’s like being stabbed, every time. “Peggy,” he starts, and then he has to clear his throat. “She’s – not waiting for anyone.”

Bucky actually looks over at him, quietly shocked. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean -”

He manages a grimace. “Not your fault.”

There’s a few minutes of silences after that, the remains of the buildings around them growing taller as they near the city center.

Then Bucky starts. “I saw both of you, you know. On the news.” It’s Steve’s turn to stare at him. “I thought it was – good. That one of us could find something close to normal, even if they took away everything else.”

There’s too much to that statement to fully unpack. But most of all, Steve’s stuck by the absurdity of it. “We weren’t normal,” he says, thinking of all the hours he and Peggy spent in their apartment planning out lines of attack, kissing over handwritten case files because anything digital would have been erased by Central’s watchdogs. His time with her had been – infinitely frustrating, infinitely precious.

And so is this, he thinks determinedly. This second chance he’s got here, the first chance he didn’t know he needed.

Bucky huffs. “Yeah. I saw that, eventually,” he says shortly. He brings the Chariot to a halt; they’ve reached the temple.

They put on the gloves and specialized boots that the colony’s inhabitants gave them. Whatever happens, they’re not supposed to compromise the integrity of the ruins. In front of the Chariot, the spires of the temple rise up into the skies, only the highest tips missing or eroded away. Steve has to marvel at how well it’s been restored.

They head inside.

Hundreds of steps, leading up to a central chamber, cooled by air currents the structure’s designed to provide. The computer, long dead, is all around them, running through the flooring, its gleaming silver wires snaking up the walls, servers housed deep beneath their feet.

Bucky steps ahead, staring up at the chambered ceiling. “Why’d you want to come here anyway?”

Steve flicks open his wrist screen, syncing up with the archaeologists’ files, all the data about what they’ve managed to tease out from the inscriptions carved into the walls. “Call it a hunch.”

He scrolls through the translations from the carvings in the temple, sorting them by date. The last message the computer gave the Kree had been deliberately erased by the alien species, but – if it was big enough to cause a war, there must have been clues leading up to it. A trail of breadcrumbs to the witch’s house.

The computer tells him the last few directives the supreme intelligence left the Kree have been carved into the wall on his right, and he heads over kneeling down to look at the engravings, trying to find a pattern.

Investments in shipping. Potential cures for illnesses. Reassignments of posting. Restoration of faith. There are too many to sort through. But – he’s looking for something specific. Something that suggests the supercomputer knew the war was coming. He uses his wrist computer to connect to an anomaly detection AI that Tony rigged up for him yesterday, running the last hundred years of directives through it and looking for anything that stuck out.

There – five years pre-war: an order to ramp up mining for ores. Not out of the ordinary, per se. But combine it with -

Three years pre-war: Build more large-scale starships. Again, not exactly a red flag. The Kree had travelled to nearby solar systems, though they used relativistic craft instead of a hyperspace drive. Expansion and exploration was only natural.

Why the emphasis on large-scale, though?

The AI finishes flagging anomalies and his flicks his wrist, throwing up a hologram of all of them mapped into a graph to hover in front of the carvings, right above the blank area at the bottom wall where the directives abruptly cut off, where the taboo was never inscribed. Little dots of red, increasing in number as the Kree drew unknowingly closer to the day they destroyed each other. He zooms out of the hologram, looking at the point the first anomalous directive was issued.

Ten years after the Kree first set foot on the inhospitable planet of Torfa in the same system. Eighteen years after they started radio-scanning the near-Hala galactic neighborhood.

Steve could write entire research papers with the wealth of information he’s just discovered in the last few minutes, but that’s not what he’s here for. He’s here for evidence. And after a fashion – he’s found it.

He’s just confirmed that most, if not all, the anomalies that could be attributed to the war pertain to interstellar travel in some way. The increased metal production eventually used to make weapons was supposed to be used to build the larger spaceships. The radio scanning technology could double up for deep-space detection. The increased military training might well have been intended to man reconnaissance missions like the ones Central sent out.

From there - it’s not too big of a jump to assume the last directive, the Kree taboo, had to do with deep space too.

So. If he’s right, there’s a link between the war and deep space.

He’s almost there. The last tumbler in the lock is slowly shifting as he aligns it with the others. He’s about to open the door.

He thinks, unbidden, of the last message the Asgardians left on Sakaar.

_Farewell and good fortune. Do not seek us among the stars._

And he’s got it.

The pattern clicks into place right where it’s supposed to be, and he can see it, he can see the one piece he was missing all this time.

He can see the truth hidden in the stars.

* * *

Bucky keeps on looking at him worriedly as they race back to the colony, but Steve stays buried in his screen, flicking through the data, seeing the patterns, letting the edges of his idea sand themselves down. It matches. It all matches.

The Kree didn’t destroy themselves after all. Not entirely.

He’s already radioed ahead, calling for an emergency meeting with the crew of the Valkyrie. He knows, with overwhelming certainty, that what he’s found is right – is the only explanation that makes sense, however fantastical. But he wants to let people he trusts know before he starts broadcasting it.

It’s not like there’s a timer on it anyway.

That they know of.

But if it could last thirteen thousand years –

He cuts that line of thought off. One thing at a time.

They screech into the colony, speeding through its winding streets and to the warehouse nearest the landing ground where Maria set them up. Their stuff’s in a different room from the one both of them walk into – what looks like a large classroom with orangeish sandstone walls, folding chairs scattered in loose rows across from a blackboard-sized screen. Steve would bet this room’s used a briefing center for new inhabitants of the colony.

When they enter, Natasha’s leaning against the desk up at the front calmly, everyone else talking rapid fire, almost half of them on the verge of shouting, the cross-talk deafening after the haunting silence of the city.

“Hey,” Steve calls, when no one seems to notice that Bucky and he are there. No reaction. “Guys!” he yells. Finally, everyone falls silent.

He turns to Natasha, seemingly the only person who hadn’t lost her head. “What’s all this about?”

“I told them who I am,” Natasha replies, raising an eyebrow. “Isn’t that what you called this meeting for?”

He pauses at that, suddenly understanding, tracing the sequence of events back to the beginning of the day. He shakes his head. “No, I knew you would.” For a brief instant, he thinks she looks shocked, but she wipes her face back into smooth neutrality before he can be sure. “This is about something else.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Tony says, pointing at him accusingly. “Something more important than _the double agent in our midst_ that you already knew about?”

He presses his lips together. He’s going to have to face the repercussions of not telling Tony immediately too. But – it can wait. He needs to let them know about what he’s figured out. “Yes. Or - I think so. I’m not sure.”

Tony splutters indignantly, but Sam crosses his arms, staring at Steve levelly. “Alright. You gonna show us?”

He takes a breath and nods, walking over to the front of the room where a he syncs his wrist computer with the screen. They don’t have a holotable here, but that might actually make it simpler. He brings up a star map of the Orion arm that Jane put together, only the known worlds highlighted.

“I know – this isn’t the greatest time,” he starts, internally wincing. He did ask Natasha to come clean, that’s on him. The timing’s just – unfortunate. “But I know we’ve all been thinking about Knowhere, and the hows and whys of who destroyed it.”

There’s a reluctant murmur of assent from everyone in the room. At the back, the handyman, leaning over the back of a flipped-around chair, cocks his head.

“Okay, so,” Steve says. “Let’s start with Knowhere. An advanced trading outpost. We know there was some kind of attack less than a thousand years ago.” He reaches up and scribbles _1000_ next to the dot marked Knowhere. “And before that we visited Sakaar, where civilization fell - ”

“A little over seven thousand years ago, yes we know,” Jane says, frowning.

“Bear with me for a second here,” he says adding the number beside Sakaar. “Sakaar was also pretty advanced at the peak of its civilization, right? They had radio, moon landings, the whole nine yards.”

Jane nods warily.

  
“Both Sakaar and Knowhere have connections to the Asgardians,” he continues. “But let's move down, closer to the galactic center. We get to Hala, seemingly unconnected to everyone else. Another advanced civilization. We know they died fighting, though we don’t know what made them so scared. They were destroyed what, around ten thousand years ago?”

“The closest estimates are actually nine thousand, but we round it up for the public,” Wanda inputs. She’s staring at the screen - he can see the gears turning in her head. He nods and writes _9000_ beside Hala. Almost there.

“Now we come to Earth. We’re fine, even if we’re surrounded by dead planets.” Natasha smiles ironically at that, and he can’t help but agree that _fine_ is overstating it. But that’s not the point. He pushes on. “But we’re also pretty young, as civilizations go. We landed on the moon less than three hundred years ago. We’ve barely had telephones and radio for five centuries. So let’s ignore Earth for the moment. We can ignore the Sokovian World too because it never had any life of its own. And then, we come to Jotunheim.”

Tony stands up, staring at the screen. He’s getting it.

“Jane,” Steve says, looking over at her. Her eyes are wide. “What’s the closest estimate for the Asgardian attack on Jotunheim?”

“Fourteen thousand years ago,” she breathes. He writes it down. Then he draws an arrow, a huge slashing line across the width of the Orion Arm.

  


“So,” Steve says. He steps back, and he can see the way everyone in the room freezes. “What does this look like to you?”

Jane stands up and moves towards him like in a dream, staring at the screen. “It’s a wave,” she says. “A wave of deliberate destruction affecting every advanced civilization starting from the Orvan void and moving across the width of the Orion arm.”

Tony starts to pace, holding his head in his hands. “Are we sure that’s what this is – I mean the timing could just be a coincidence - but no, the Asgardians were in all three places, if it was really them, then it makes sense for it be a pattern. But wait – what about Hala?”

Wanda’s scowling at the screen. “That’s why you wanted to visit the temple, isn’t it? You think the Kree taboo was a message from the supercomputer warning them about an attack from another civilization that they couldn’t hope to survive.”

Steve turns to her, expression grim. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. Wouldn’t we react the same way if the options we were given by our god were to abandon our only home or die? If that’s what the supreme intelligence told them, I’m not surprised war broke out.”

Sam clicks his teeth together. “So what - you think that the Asgardians – a single alien race that we’ve never actually seen - literally swept through the galaxy destroying any civilization they found?”

Steve grimaces. “That’s my theory.”

Bucky is frowning at the screen, his expression thoughtful.

Jane whirls back on him. “But what about Sakaar?” 

“What about it?”

“The murals in the lowest level. They were around ten thousand years old. But the city was destroyed seven thousand years ago. That’s a three thousand year gap between when we have a confirmed Asgardian sighting and the annihilation of the civilization."

Steve opens his mouth to start in on his theory about that, but then there’s a fizzing, popping noise from the back of the room. Too slow, he whirls his head around only for the lights to die, the screen turning off with a faint hiss, the letters dissolving into static so that there’s no light in the room at all – even his comms have stopped their faint but ever present buzzing , except no, that’s not entirely true, there’s something –

There are two pinpricks of blue-white light slowly flickering into existence at the back, crackling, shifting slightly, popping with static electricity, ramping up to full power in stops and starts. As Steve watches, they slowly move, rising up from a few feet above the ground to head height, and he realizes with a sickening lurch that the spacing between them, the smooth shifting movement – the reason they unsettle him so much is that they remind him of eyes – they’re someone’s _eyes_ , dear god.

There’s a faint clatter as people shove their seats away, standing up, shrieking as they come to the same disturbing realization, but Steve’s sunk into that eerie calmness that was forced into him over the years at SHIELD, every sense at the ready, waiting for whoever – whatever – it is to make a move.

“Well,” says a deep voice coming from near those unearthly eyes, lightning flaring out of the irises, and Steve’s heard that voice before, it’s right at the tip of his tongue, in the common room, over the comms, over laughter in the Chariots, fuck, if he can just remember –

Fuck.

It’s the handyman’s voice.

“I suppose,” the voice continues, the lightning making aborted attempts to jump from its eyes to a set of well-defined shoulders, “that we have finally reached the end.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Hides*  
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated <3


	10. Protector

Before Steve can react further – or anyone else in room can, really – the lighting jumps out from the eyes, seeming to precisely target wherever the people in the room are. Almost in slow motion, Steve watches in horror as a bolt heads towards his chest. He’s thrown back with tremendous force, hearing the others’ cries as the bolts hit them too, and then his head hits the wall of the room and he feels his heart give a mighty shudder in his chest with the massive electric shock –

Everything goes black.

He wakes up in the dark.

He blinks, assessing. He’s crumpled in a heap on a smooth metallic surface. Groaning, he gets to his knees. In the pitch black, it’s initially difficult to make anything out, but he thinks he sees the vague shapes of other people sprawled across the floor of the room. Wait – there aren’t any of the folding chairs blocking his vision. The floor’s too smooth against his palms, not the gritty smoothed-over earth of the warehouse classroom.

He doesn’t think they’re in the warehouse anymore. 

Blinking hard, he tries to orient himself. There’s a vast, hulking shape in the center of the room, a blackness darker than the rest. A table? And the air – the air smells familiar. Canned, well-worn, run through filters a hundred times.

Like the air in a spaceship.

He thinks – he thinks he’s in the Valkyrie common room.

There’s a soft glint of the food locker where it’s supposed to be, a few misshapen heaps that he initially thought were people but may be Tony’s ridiculous bean bags. He’s pretty sure, now.

Shit.

Somehow, he’s gotten to the Valkyrie – but how? He has no earthly idea. The others are probably here too, if the shapes on the floor are any indication. And even though lights are still blown, the most damning piece of evidence to support his conclusion is that instead of silence from the walls there’s an almost inaudible humming running through them that’s become all too familiar to him in their month of travelling.

He thinks they’re airborne.

That’s – bad.

One thing at a time.

Crawling, he reaches the figure nearest to where he woke up, finding an outstretched arm and checking for a pulse. Alive. He can’t make out who it is, but the figure’s small and when he checks the hand is calloused, so probably Tony.

The next figure he checks for a pulse grabs his throat.

“Bucky,” he manages to wheeze out, catching the glint of a grey-blue eye, and the hand withdraws as quickly as it came, Bucky scrambling to sit up in the dark, almost bumping right into his nose, murmuring out apologies.

“No harm done” Steve rasps, shaking his head, bringing his hand up to feel around his throat. It’s a good thing that he’s been enhanced - he has a distinct feeling someone less invulnerable wouldn’t have gotten away so easily.

“Where are we?” Bucky whispers. He’s caught on that they aren’t in the classroom anymore.

“Valkyrie common room, I think,” Steve murmurs back. How the fuck did they get here? Is everyone from the Valkyrie crew even here? And if they’re airborne –

One thing at a time.

The first order of business is to find out who else is in the room with them. He guesses he and Bucky have woken up first because of their healing factor courtesy of the prototype Rebirth serum.

“Fuck,” Bucky curses lowly. “You got a light?”

“No, my electronics are fried. You?”

“Same.”

He shakes his head, trying to dispel the lingering dizziness. “We need to find out who else is in here.”

Bucky’s silhouette hunches over slightly. “Not sure I’m up for much moving around.”

Honestly, he _does_ feel like someone went to town with a baseball bat to his chest, not to mention the fresh bruising around his throat. That lightning bolt really did a number on him. But they need to find out what’s happening.

If they’re airborne, they’re being taken somewhere. He doesn’t intend to go quietly.

“I’ll check the others, you get the door.”

Bucky nods and gets unsteadily to his feet, shuffling towards the darkness of the wall. Steve makes his way back to Tony, tries to wake him up. Nothing. His heart sinks, a jolt of fear running through him. Tony’s not exactly – young. And who knows what the lightning did to them, what effects it had.

The next person he checks is probably Jane, given how small they are. And thank the heavens, when he taps on her hand and calls her name quietly a few times she groans, her eyes fluttering open.

Right. She got Rebirth treatment too. The final version that supposedly had just the lifespan altering effects, but Steve wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more immediate benefits crept in as well.

“Steve,” Bucky calls softly from the other end of the room. “The door circuit’s fried.”

One more shitty thing to add to the list.

They’ve been locked in.

Exactly how long were they out? How did the handyman get enough time to move them all in here, let alone do it unnoticed?

“Got it,” He calls. Quietly, he briefs Jane, and after a moment of getting her bearings, she says she can probably help with the door. He keeps a hand on her elbow as they head over to where Bucky’s voice is coming from, carefully stepping around another two prone figures, unable to make out who they are in the darkness. That means Tony, Jane, Bucky, him and two more are here for sure. That’s six people. He still can’t see into the corners in the pitch black of the room, so there might be a seventh person too. If there is, then that’s everyone.

Except for the handyman. Who’s kidnapped them, apparently.

It takes Jane two minutes to get the door unlocked even in the absolute lack of light, Bucky helping her with the wiring. The door releases with a faint hiss, opening out into the lightless corridor.

“Get everyone to the loading bay,” Steve murmurs to the both of them, checking to see whether the coast’s clear. The escape pod’s in the loading bay, as are their suits. It might give them a chance - if they’re not in hyperspace yet.

“What’re you going to do?” Bucky whispers back suspiciously.

“If we’re airborne, he’s either trying to get us off planet or he already has. I’m heading to the bridge.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No,” Steve says firmly, barely remembering to keep his voice down. “It’s more important to get everyone out of harm’s way. We’ll need to split up and the two of you have to wake everyone else up or get more people down faster if they don’t.”

“Why can’t I go the bridge?” Bucky murmurs, quietly furious.

“Buck,” Steve reminds him. “You’re the pilot. The escape pod’s going nowhere without you.”

He can feel Bucky’s scowl directed at him, though he can’t really see it.

“I don’t like it either,” Jane agrees. “But it does make sense.”

“Fine,” Bucky replies. But there’s a sour, unhappy note to his voice, and Steve feels a tug in his chest, right behind his sternum. He feels around for Bucky’s hand and brings it up to his face, holding it tight.

“I’ll be okay,” he murmurs.

Bucky turns away wordlessly.

Well.

Steve pushes his hurt down.

He’s got someone to find.

* * *

There are no weapons on a civilian ship. Nothing that could potentially blast through the hull. And the entire ship is made of metal, perfect for conducting the kind of lightning that the handyman – god, who have they brought along, he’s probably not even _human_ – seems to favor. So there’s no real way to prepare for whatever he’s going to come face-to-face with on the bridge. He briefly considers picking up one of the fire extinguishers to use as a battering ram – but no. Metal again. He doesn’t have time to stop by the labs either if he wants to get to the bridge before the handyman takes them wherever he’s planning to.

As Steve creeps along the dark passageways, sticking to the walls, more and more things slot into place. The way the handyman never ate. His ramblings about Knowhere – fuck, he’s probably been there before. The drink in the flask that overcame Steve’s own unknown souped-up metabolism.

All of it, pointing in the same direction.

Option one, highly unlikely: there’s a secret society of humans with superpowers who have done way more space travelling than the rest of the world’s aware of – frankly absurd, especially with the absolute stranglehold Central has over the planet. But if he discards that, all that’s left is option two: the handyman’s not human at all. Which means.

He’s an alien.

A living, breathing alien. On their ship.

On the Valkyrie.

Who just knocked them out and kidnapped them.

And even though Steve’s dedicated a large portion of his remembered life to studying the artifacts people not from earth left behind, sketching out their monuments, piecing together their lives, he never thought he’d meet them - or at the very least, not in this way. Maybe somebody would have discovered a planet first, with radio signals. Maybe someone famous would have been sent to check. And then on the news reels, the first glorious glimpse of a living, sentient being from another world.

Not like this. Never like this.

Someone who had been living on earth, undetected – for how many years? Able to slip under the radar so completely he had been approved for space travel.

How many more like him are there, waiting in the shadows?

And - he must be Asgardian. It’s the only thing that makes sense. The way he revealed himself only at the revelation of Steve’s discovery of the Asgardian-orchestrated wave. Further back, the way he helped with the one specific translation that told them not to look. With a flash, Steve remembers the lightning, the way it rippled out from his eyes.

\- the vein like patterns around the eyes of the Jotunheim figure –

Fuck. He’s been an idiot. They all have. And right at this very minute, their lives are in the hands of this alien, this Asgardian, this member of a race that systematically destroyed four different civilizations, left Jotunheim barren and Hala crumbling.

What if this is the beginning of the Asgardian attack on humanity? What if this guy was a scout?

Each possibility is more terrifying than the last.

“– confirming hyperspace jump,” comes a faint voice from the bridge, and Steve speeds up, not bothering with stealth anymore. If they jump, then there’s no getting away, no stopping whatever havoc the handyman wishes to wreak.

He skids into the bridge on the tail end of a sprint, ready to attack with everything he’s got, but almost trips over his own feet when he sees – _Sam_ , not the unearthly figure of the handyman – _Sam_ , leaning intently over the control panel, one hand to his comms and the other moving towards to a red button, not having even turned around at the sound of Steve running in.

“Sam – NO!” he yells, but it’s too late. The shock of seeing him here and not the handyman has cost Steve his momentum, and even though he tries to reach him before it happens, Sam’s hand comes down on the button, and on the windscreen the stars of the skies above Hala stretch out into infinity, dragging behind the ship, before fading into the swirling multicolored mists of hyperspace. Mid lunge, Steve almost buckles over from the sudden nausea, stumbling to one side, grabbing onto a chair to keep his balance.

Jesus. He’s never done that before. Pushing down the urge to retch, he glances up to where Sam’s standing unaffected, having pivoted around to eye Steve critically.

“Sam,” Steve grits out. “What the _hell_ was that?”

For an instant, Sam says nothing, but then he looks resigned and seems to – shimmer, and Steve watches with growing horror as the image of Sam fades away, a glimmer of light running across his torso until it’s the handyman standing there in his place.

“A trick,” he says heavily, “That I learnt from my brother.”

Steve freezes, every nerve in his body going on high alert.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the handyman says. “I only did what I had to.”

Steve ignores the platitudes. He’s hyperaware that he could be killed instantly. Whatever he really is, the handyman clearly doesn’t need weapons, not when he has – fucking personal lightning apparently, and the ability to hide himself as whomever he pleases.

But that’s never stopped him before.

He brings his fists up, stepping away from the chair, settling into a defensive stance. If he’s gonna go out, he’s going out swinging, protecting everyone else as best as he can. They’ve jumped, so all he can hope for is to buy the others enough time to put together a plan to take this guy out.

“What do you want,” he says icily.

The handyman sighs.

“To protect you,” he replies. “From yourselves if necessary.”

More riddles. Steve’s sick and tired of them at this point. Enough beating around the bush, talking in circles, being manipulated.

“Start talking.”

“My actual name is Thor,” the handyman – Thor – says immediately. “My home world is a place close to the galactic center that your people would call Asgard -”

Strangely, he seems ready enough to cooperate. But Steve isn’t interested in his backstory right now. He keeps half of his attention focused on what the guy’s saying – something about his father being a mighty and just ruler – but recalculates. Priority one: stall for time. Priority two: look for an opening to attack. However friendly he may seem for the moment, the lightning’s not something Steve would prefer to face again. The bridge emergency suits are to his left; they’re hefty enough and their oxygen tanks are a nonmetallic composite. But they’re too far away.

There. Tucked into the back of the chair in front of him. _Bucky’s_ chair. A miniature weight, the type they’re supposed to use to retain muscle mass for overlong journeys off planet. It’s not big enough to use as a bludgeon – but as a distraction?

It’ll do the job.

Within a second, he wrenches it out of its holding and throws it at the handyman’s head with all his might, using the instant he takes to bat it away to leap forward.

Steve tackles him, using the element of surprise, feinting with an uppercut and then head-butting him as hard as he can, reaching his hands out trying to get his arms into a lock, but before he can even make contact, Thor twists away and slams his head forward right into Steve’s nose, and he feels something break seconds before he a burning hot liquid starts dripping down onto his lips. Shit. Recalculate. An opening – to his left. He ducks down, ignoring the taste of rust, trying to go for a tackle, managing to get Thor to stagger to the side, collapsing to one knee, and then swipes out a leg around the other leg, twisting his own around the guy’s thigh, bringing them both down in a heap, trying to wrestle his arms behind him. It’s not the best angle, and for a brief moment his head’s open to attack again and he braces for the dizzying impact, but Thor doesn’t take the advantage, instead using his superhuman strength to pin Steve’s right arm instead.

“Stop this madness,” he growls at Steve, trying to find an angle to get at Steve’s left arm. It isn’t looking good. Steve’s out of practice – Peggy was right, he should have kept up his training. A glob of blood drips down onto the floor

Then the ceiling explodes.

Natasha drops down from a panel and flings out her wrist, a small buzzing disks flying out from underneath her sleeve, latching on to the handyman’s neck and staying there, seemingly paralyzing him, causing him to go limp, his grip loosening from around Steve, who unhooks his thigh and scrabbles away, spitting out the blood that’s collected in his mouth. At the same moment, Tony comes into view at the other entrance to the bridge, him and Sam and Bucky together holding up his cylindrical robot like a missile, and then Tony presses a button on its side and it launches out of their hands straight into Thor’s chest, knocking him clean off his feet and into the wall just as Steve ducks out of the way.

Sam rushes into the room from the doorway, something looped up in his hands, and from where he’s sitting Steve sees what he and Natasha intend to do and staggers up to help, and together they use the cable they used with the winch in Sakaar to tie up the unmoving handyman, who seems conscious but shivering, his teeth gritted together, spasming in aborted movements like he’s having a seizure.

“What’d you hit him with?” Steve asks Natasha, wiping at his nose once they’re done, the back of his hand alarmingly bloody. Thor’s hands are secured firmly behind his back, and his legs are tied together an impressive number of times with knots that would make sailors weep.

“My bites,” she says briskly, checking the rope before signaling all clear to the rest of them. “They were a contingency plan to handle you in case you were hostile. Stark,” she addresses over her shoulder, and Tony grumbles aggravatedly, already laying out a rubber film on the floor, then stepping back as the others heave Thor’s twitching form onto it before backing away. She taps at her wrist computer and the handyman’s spasming stops, though she keeps a close eye on him, her fingers hovering less than an inch above the screen. She crouches down, coming eye-to-eye. “Give me a reason.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Thor grits out, looking pained.

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Sam replies firmly, and then goes over to the control panel to figure out where they’re being taken, leaving them to it.

Bucky steps up beside Steve. “What happened to you,” he says out of the corner of his mouth to Steve, his voice dangerously even.

Steve winces, stopping himself from prodding the bridge of his nose. “It’s nothing. I broke my nose, that’s all.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow, not saying a word. Beside him, Wanda grimaces and says she’ll get some gauze from the medbay, running off. Jane hovers anxiously in the background, her eyes jumping between Steve and Thor.

Sam’s brought up the screen above the holo-panel, is flicking through them with alarming speed. “He’s locked the reentry coordinates,” he says to the room. “And reconfigured the jump somehow. We’re – going _way_ further than this ship should be able to handle. But jump time’s only _five hours_.”

“What the fuck. That’s not possible,” Tony mutters, and then leaves their huddle monitoring Thor to join Sam.

Bucky leans over the alien, scowling. “What’d you do the jump, asshole?”

The handyman, even bound up as he is, grins slightly. “Improved it. After the damage from the explosion on Sakaar, I made a few modifications to the hyper engines, made them more precise. Faster too, if you knew how to apply them correctly.”

Jane’s eyes widen with realization. “We crashed at Knowhere because of _you_.”

He makes a face. “I didn’t expect this one,” he jerks his head at Bucky, “to be _quite_ so adept. But I do take part of the responsibility. Now _let me go_.”

“One hint of the lightning, big guy,” Natasha reminds him, waving her wrist computer in front of his face. “And you shut up. Permanently.”

“You think you can keep me contained?” he grits out, visibly straining against the bonds. “You think you know what you’re up against?”

“That doesn’t give you the right to be judge, jury and executioner,” Steve says, wiping away a fresh trickle of blood from his nose.

“Enough of this,” Thor growls, eyes flashing

There’s a spark of static electricity, a shimmer, and then the ship dissolves away around them.

Flashes, faded and washed out.

\- A figure, walking towards a golden throne, clad in black and green, obsidian spikes branching out from its head, twin swords in its hands -

\- A courtyard, strewn with slain people, all of them recognizably inhuman – Asgardian, the same odd proportions, the same muscled bulk, now pale and lifeless -

\- A shimmering mirage, its face flickering in and out of focus, talking almost casually, save for the undercurrent of urgency in its voice. “ - she's stronger than both of us. She's stronger than you. You don't stand a chance.” -

\- The first figure, a lady in black and green, leaning over the handyman, holding him by the throat, “One by one, all the realms will fall to us. I'll open the bridge even if I have to kill every single one of them to do it.” -

\- At the end of a glittering bridge, a furious battle, an explosion of light, a furious scream, and then swords erupt from the spiked black and green figure, bringing down the warriors fighting her, but it’s too late, the bridge is destroyed. “You idiot,” she hisses at him, more blades sliding into her hands. “Now I’ll just do it the old fashioned way” -

\- Later, the handyman – Thor – fighting a never-ending horde of skull warriors at the edge of a cliff, two more figures at his side, before faltering under the onslaught, falling, a sword coming at his throat. The second figure - a brief glimpse of pale skin, lanky black hair - shouts, and a glimmering green crack opens underneath Thor and the third figure and they fall in, into the stone of the cliff, into a sparking passageway that stretches out, glimmering into infinity -

When Steve blinks back into himself, he’s still standing on the bridge right where he was, Bucky and Natasha beside him. Except in front of them – is a coil of cable, lying in a heap on the floor, its ends looking burnt. The handyman’s across the room, eyeing them warily.

“Would you agree to talk in peace now?”

Steve shakes his head to clear it, the afterimages of the – visions – still lingering against his eyes. What – the hell was that? It feels like – someone’s memories. _Thor’s_ memories. Flashes of him trying to fight – someone. Someone who talked about attacking all the “realms”.

Do the realms mean the alien civilizations? Hala, Sakaar, Jotunheim and Knowhere? And if it does – does it mean – that Thor’s on their side?

Natasha’s the quickest to unfreeze. “Seems like we don’t have an option.”

He inclines his head. “I don’t want bloodshed any more than you do.”

Steve checks in with Tony and Sam, both looking frazzled but fine. The visions shook everyone.

“We agree to a truce,” Sam calls out. “And you tell us everything.”

“Those are fair terms.”

So. It’s decided then.

* * *

They reconvene in the common room. Steve’s holding a wad of gauze to his nose, as directed by Wanda, it having been none-too gently set into place by an exasperated Bucky. It’s healing slower than he’s used to, thanks to Natasha’s meds, even though he missed his last dose.

Sam stares at Thor intently. “We’re waiting.”

“You’ve figured out so much already,” he says, his eyes warm and sad. He smiles at Jane. “You‘re getting too close. I had to warn you before it was too late, before you had committed to the path without knowing.”

Tony shakes his head, waving a fist at Thor, almost white with fury. “And warning us means _kidnapping_ us?”

He looks unhappy. “I had to. You couldn’t anyone else know.”

“Know _what_?” Natasha asks, looking murderous.

“Yeah, even we don’t know what we know.” Jane adds, more confused than anything else. “We knew even _less_ before you showed us – whatever that was. Is this about the translations, or the wave?”

Thor turns to Natasha. “You – there were no details of the translations in your messages, yes?”

She narrows her eyes and cocks her head. “And if there were?”

“Then you may have accelerated the death of humanity.”

Again, the pieces click into place. The first wave. Jotunheim. The way Thor seems to truly want to help them, however misguided his actions are. “You think we’re on our way to uncovering something that will make – whoever we saw - start a second wave,” Steve blurts out, and feels the moment the logic settles into place.

Thor nods, somber.

Everyone processes that for a minute.

Tony leans forward, pointing at Thor. “What is the wave? Were these guys right?”

“The wave,” Thor says, heavily, “is the work of my sister, who sits on the throne of Asgard, thirsting for blood even today.”

Steve leans back. The visions. The enemy, in gilded black and green, unstoppable in all her murderous glory.

That was this guy’s _sister_?

“Wait a minute,” Tony says. “Jotunheim was destroyed almost fourteen thousand years ago. Are you saying _your sister_ did that?”

Thor looks briefly guilty, but then seems to steel himself. “I fought alongside her at Jotunheim, though my father was the one who ordered the armies into action after they attacked us.”

“Back up a moment,” Steve says, reeling. “How old are you exactly?”

Thor tilts his head. “Ah, I see what worries you. No, I’m not quite that old, our planet is quite close to what you call a black hole, so time stretches.” Everyone except Jane and Tony relaxes. He continues: “I’m only ten thousand, by your reckoning.”

Steve chokes on the air in his throat.

Tony looks around at everyone else’s gobsmacked expressions. “Did everyone else here think time dilation was by a factor or fifty or something?”

“Stark,” Sam says wearily. “Not everyone has a PhD.”

“Hah that’s rich,” Tony starts, but Steve cuts in, zeroing in on the possibility of a solution to the mystery that’s been plaguing researches ever since the Jotunheim figure was found.

“Moving on - Jotunheim attacked you?”

“They were vassals to our empire, yes,” Thor says. “And then they betrayed us, and made an attempt on our throne that had been decades in the making. We took revenge as we saw fit, but my sister was not satisfied with only the destruction of their planet. She wished to make an example of your sector. I was young, and molded by her to take pride in the glory of battle, but slowly I grew to see her ambition for the senseless fury it truly was. Eventually, I turned against her.”

Jane leans forward, one particular piece of that revelation catching her attention. “When you say your _empire_ , what do you mean?”

“It’d be easier to show you,” he says, leaning over the table, causing everyone to tense briefly, and brining up a hologram of the galaxy. The shimmering stars of the Milky Way float above the holotable, rotating slowly, earth a blinking red dot. He pinches his fingers over the center, slowly drawing them out, letting a blue bubble expand along with the movement until he lets go just shy of the Orvan void.

“That,” he says, “is the extent of her territory.”

* * *

(hologram with additions by ~~Donald Blake~~ )

* * *

The bubble encompasses probably close to fifty billion stars.

There’s a moment of silence.

Steve’s reevaluating everything he knows for the thousandth time today.

“Earth…” Wanda says slowly, speaking for everyone in the room, “Is on the outskirts of an alien empire?”

Thor bows his head. “We saw no point expanding further to the – forgive my phrasing – savage outlands of the galaxy. The habitable stars were too far apart to make civilian movement comfortable.”

Tony leans forward. “Okay, leaving aside that extremely hurtful comment – if that’s the case why haven’t we heard anything from you guys? Radio, gamma – we haven’t received any sign at all that there’s a teeming imperialist bunch of wackos right next door.”

Thor scoffs. “We haven’t used anything as primitive as radio in eons. It’s as crude as painting a target over yourself – which is exactly why the others in your region were so easily found and eliminated by my sister’s army.”

Bucky cocks his head. “So why did you come to Earth?” He’s brought them right to the point, as usual.

Thor sighs. “I arrived centuries ago to protect you from sharing their fate.”

“So why even allow us to progress this far, if radio is the issue? Why not sabotage us from the beginning? Or if stumbling into their territory is the thing that tips them off, why not keep humanity hostage, never allow us to travel out to the stars?”

His face hardens. “We tried that. What do you think happened on Sakaar?”

Jane gasps, having visibly put the pieces together. “The warnings in the lower level. The death motif.”

He inclines his head. “Yes. But we – I and the few others who escaped my sister’s wrath - were too early. We told them: the wave has started; death is coming, unless you stay quiet. We told them not to look for anyone out in the stars, unless they wanted to be consumed by the wave. We told them, if you must travel, travel only outwards, to Knowhere where they could buy themselves some time. We stayed as their unmerciful gods for a hundred years, and left thinking they would remember our lessons. But they were too short-lived, too hopeful. They forgot. They wanted to explore.”

“And they died for it,” Jane says quietly.

Steve feels anger bubble up from somewhere deep inside him. The death of an entire planet, down to bad timing. “You couldn’t have gone back to your planet and stopped it from happening at all?”

Thor’s eyes flash with anger, but he visibly tamps it down. “I did not go back to Asgard,” Thor says, the words visibly paining him, but then gaining conviction. “So that I was not killed. And if I was not killed, I could give others a chance.”

“Fair enough,” Steve says, into the ensuing silence. “So, to sum up: we – as in us humans – have progressed just enough that pretty much any day now the crazy queen of a galactic empire is going to notice us and eradicate our species. And when you saw that one of us had put together that the attacks were coming from across the Orvan void, you kidnapped us before we could tell anyone else - or allow our natural curiosity to make us take a look and fall right into her hands.”

He smiles. “Correct.”

“But it’s too late,” Bucky cuts in, sounding pensive. “Danvers knows about Knowhere too. Do you think they won’t piece together the dates, figure out the pattern, investigate the other side of the void?”

Thor looks briefly lost, but then rallies. “The colonel will be occupied by her duties on Hala for some time yet. By the time she thinks to check I can easily ask one of the other rebels to destroy the city.”

Steve exchanges a thoroughly alarmed glance with Bucky and Sam, and by mutual unspoken agreement, they agree not to say anything more.

“That still doesn’t solve the problem,” Jane says, not noticing the increase in tension. “We’re sitting ducks if the Asgardians scan our sector again, unless we warn people to stop sending radios signals out.”

“We’re sitting ducks even _if_ we warn people,” Tony says bitterly. “You think Central is going to listen to anyone in this room if we tell them, _Hey pals no more satellites, no more profiting off interstellar travel unless you want to fucking die?_ No, they’ll use it as an excuse to lock us up. I bet they’d even enjoy it, after the trouble half of the people here have caused them.”

Sam frowns. “Why’d you wait so long to intervene?” he asks Thor.

“I did sabotage a few deep space probes,” Thor replies wearily. “But if I wanted to prevent it instead of merely delaying the inevitable, the choice was between enslaving humanity to keep them quiet or this and I could not do that. Your kind is intent on exploration, on discovery. You would not have stopped out of your own will, nor would your government have listened to my concerns. I had to let a few people find out by themselves so that they would believe me.

“So,” he continues. “You now have a choice. You know the true risk of releasing what you have found. But you also know the perils if things continue to proceed as they are. I will not lose your kind. And you – all of you, who have worked so hard against injustice in your own ways, worked so hard for a better world - I am hoping you will agree to assist me in finding a way to protect it.”

There’s a stunned silence. Natasha raises her eyebrows. “That’s some request.”

“If you do not wish to join me, I will not hold it against you. Where I am taking you, you will have time to decide.”

“That’s good and all, but where exactly _are_ you taking us?” Sam asks after a moment.

Thor pulls up a hologram, zeroing on the coordinates Steve briefly remembers seeing “Sam” having pulled up on the screen before they jumped. Above the holotable, three suns dance around one another – the largest a red giant that’s almost fifty times bigger than the smallest, a white dwarf. Between them, barely visible, is a small speck buffeted back and forth in the gravitational pull.

“The only planet of a trinary star system,” Thor says simply.

Jane’s head shoots up. “But that’s not possible - the orbit of any planet in a trinary system would be unstable.”

He looks pleased. “It is. The planet’s trajectory is decaying. In another million years it will fall into the closest of the suns.”

Wanda tilts her head, the lights from the hologram reflecting off her eyes. “No one would look for somebody hiding here.”

“Exactly. It is a fresh start, if you choose that too.”

* * *

Later, everyone’s retreated to their bunks, taking the bare hour they have left on their journey to process everything they’ve gotten to know. Now that it’s clear that Thor’s trustworthy, they’ve let him go back to his own room too, though Steve’s pretty sure that Natasha’s put a tripwire across the door so she’ll know when it opens.

But he can’t settle down.

It’s too much.

What a horrible thing to learn, he thinks. To spend your life searching for a friend, for the simple knowledge that you weren’t alone. And then when you find them, the only other people alive, you realize that they’re the enemy, that they would kill you without a moment’s hesitation.

He doesn’t know why it suddenly matters to him so much. Maybe it’s his unconscious, projecting its own blank spaces into the stars, thinking if he could just piece that together find what he was missing, then he could piece his own life together too.

But it didn’t happen that way.

He – needs to stop thinking about this. He stands up, slipping out of his own bunk and to the next.

“Hey,” he says leaning in the doorframe

Bucky looks up from his screen, his brow furrowing. Steve thinks unbidden, of a steel door banging open, a wide beaming smile. “Hi.”

“Got a moment?”

Bucky shrugs. “Sure.”

Steve moves over to sit beside him, shuffling over slightly so that he’s turned towards him.

\- grey-blue eyes, crouched in front of his bed -

“How’s your nose?” Bucky asks him.

“Oh,” he says slightly surprised, reaching up to touch it with a finger. There’s barely any pain anymore. His healing must have finally kicked in. And – what’d you know – no headache. “Its fine, nothing happened.”

“That used to be a habit with you, you know,” Bucky says softly, frowning. “You never would take care of yourself, and then I’d get so sucked into looking after you until I couldn’t think about anyone else.”

Steve’s stomach drops down into his toes. “I didn’t mean,” he starts, but then Bucky quirks his mouth and Steve’s words catch in his throat.

“You never do,” he says. “It’s just who you are.”

Steve makes a face. “You’re not much better,” he rallies weakly, knowing it’s bait but unable to stop himself from rising to it anyway. “Flying into an explosion.”

“But I knew exactly what it’d do to me,” Bucky says, his eyes holding Steve’s in an unbreakable gaze. “It did make my think, though. About the time we have left. And if you’re still you,” he says, slowly, “even if you don’t remember – then, maybe it doesn’t need to matter so much. Do you want this?”

And Steve does want, he wants with everything he has, he’d like to hold on to Bucky and never let go, take the time to get to know him down to the last atom so that they could never take him out of his mind ever again, no matter how hard they try. He wants to know every way he smiles, every way he moves.

“Yes,” he says, breathless, and watches a hint of smugness, an entirely new tenderness rise into Bucky’s face at the word. He doesn’t care He doesn’t – he’ll let Bucky be smug for the rest of his life, if he can have this. Any of this.

“Though,” Bucky says, pulling back slightly, biting his lip to hide a teasing smile “It wouldn’t hurt to check what you did remember.”

“You asshole,” Steve says, though he can’t hide his grin. “Dum Dum’s not in the next bunk over anymore, get on with it.”

“There you are, sweetheart,” Bucky says, and kisses him.

* * *

The landing is smooth.

Thor spends the time after re-entry trying to explain to an enraptured Jane and Tony about how he modified the engines to - what he describes as - _squiggle_ space, though how that’s different from regular hyperspace folding, Steve can’t make heads or tails of. He ignores their banter, filled with anticipation at the thought of seeing a new world, unexplored by humanity.

They gather in the loading bay, talking over each other, eager to see this impossible, temporary planet, and then, as the ramp lowers down, everyone goes suddenly, completely quiet.

The view is breathtaking.

They’re on a smooth plateau, a soft rise just at the edge of a sprawling jungle rolling across hills out into the distance. There’s no moon in the sky, just the blazing edge of a gigantic sunset at one edge of the horizon, and off to one side, the faint light of a rising star, like a searchlight in the heavens.

The wind is cool against his face. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear the burbling of a stream, the steady crashing rhythm of a waterfall.

“Take as long as you need to decide,” Thor says. “I’ve come to trust your judgment.”

Steve looks at the crew as they step out onto the grass. An alien prince. A spy. A researcher. A soldier who betrayed his own government for loyalty to a friend. Two boys from New Brooklyn who survived the worst of what humans could do to each other to reach the other side. An ex-CEO of a former weapons and enforcement company, now turning to green energy after his kidnapping on a planet where prisoners were forced to mine their sentences away. A scientist who dedicated her life to studying the stars.

How much, has changed, in a month. He remembers sitting down in the Valkyries for the first time, flipping through his sketches, his excitement at getting a chance to chip away at the mysteries out in space.

He never expected them to unravel underneath his fingers, fall apart like dust.

But more than that, deep down somewhere he thought that finding someone out there would help. That they would be a friend, a guiding hand for humanity. That together, humanity and their friends would move forward into an age where none of the old barriers or prejudices would matter, where problems could be solved as easy as reaching out a hand to ask for help.

Isn’t that what everyone hopes for, looking out into the stars?

But it was all a farce. Wherever they come from, whoever they are, human or not – people are people. Equally given to pettiness and compassion, equally given to heal or to hurt. He understood it, at some level, earlier, but he never really saw what it meant. The way the Kree, religiously writing everything down, were too afraid to inscribe the code a computer spat out. The way Bucky stepped out into the snow to take off his helmet. The beautiful, open markets of Knowhere, a place to rest for weary travellers. The Central official spitting in his face.

It was stupid to imagine that finding someone else out there would fix everything.

Humanity always had to save itself first.

He looks out into the forest, the crew of the Valkyrie ranging out away from the loading doors, staring at the greenery, the sky with wonder. It’s only him and Bucky left on the ramp, Bucky standing in the shadows to his left.

Steve half turns towards him, trying to bring up a smile. He holds out his hand. “You coming?” he asks, and can feel his nervousness in the question, the way it means far more than a simple step onto the jungle floor, far more than this isolated moment on a new planet, far away from home. He holds his breath, waiting for his reply.

“I’m with you.” Bucky answers simply, and takes Steve’s hand.

Together, they step onto the soil of a new world.

* * *

> _“To the betrayers of Jotunheim, we say._
> 
> _Listen well as our armies descend,_
> 
> _As the lights of your world grow cold._
> 
> _And, in this six-thousandth year_
> 
> _From the ascendancy of Odin,_
> 
> _We will come: who tread the dawn,_
> 
> _Trample the suns beneath our feet,_
> 
> _And promise to travelers forevermore:_
> 
> _As we stride across the stars,_
> 
> _We will bring the weapons of gods.”_
> 
> _\- Jotunheim inscription, translated by Jane Foster with assistance from Natasha Romanoff and Donald Blake_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After this, we have an epilogue to go.  
> Comments and kudos give me life.


	11. The Future

In the memory, he stares at the screen through his thick glasses, the beginning of a headache making itself known. Just a few minutes more. Morita and Dum Dum’s trackers are moving slowly through the foliage, approaching the hostiles, Dernier’s planted the explosives where Steve told him the weaknesses in the building are and Bucky’s bodycam shows him that he’s got a direct line of sight to the enemy. Feeling an oncoming tightness in his chest, he takes a moment his inhaler, and then switches his comms on.

“Now,” he tells them.

A thousand miles away, the Howling Commandos attack.

After clean up, when the rest of the Howlies are heading towards the rendezvous point, Bucky switches comms channels so it’s just the two of them. “Steve?”

“I’m here,” Steve says. “What’s up?”

“I hate that they sent us out today.” Bucky says. “Especially when you’ve got that procedure tomorrow.”

“You worry too much,” Steve tells him.

“Asshole. Don’t’ tell me you don’t give me good reason to.”

“Listen; I’ll be fine.”

“You better be,” Bucky says, his voice turning fond – and slightly nervous. “You know - I might be planning something for when I get back.”

Steve feels an overwhelming rush of warmth, of anticipation. Is it – but no, best not to speculate, in case he sets himself up for heartbreak. But he hopes it is what he thinks it might be, what he and Bucky have been edging closer towards from the moment they’ve known each other, the admission that they mean more to each other than friends, that they always have, that they always will.

Then again, it might be something else.

Whatever happens tomorrow, he knows his life won’t be the same.

He pulls himself together. On the other end of the line, he can hear Bucky breathing.

“Looking forward to it,” he replies softly. “See you soon.”

He signs off.

He wakes up.

There are tears in his eyes.

* * *

This world is green and young and growing, and the air tastes like lilies in full bloom.

They have time here. Time to regroup, time to decide what they want to do with the information they’ve gained. There are no colony rules, no lack of oxygen or supplies, no confined spaceship that could limit the possibilities.

Steve wonders, in a way, if this is a way of the universe giving him exactly what he had wanted.

He left earth to make things right for everyone back home - so that Central couldn’t win. But he had wondered, packing his things for the Valkyrie, if this wasn’t running away, if this wasn’t shutting himself into a metal container and putting his life on hold. The Valkyrie mission was Tony’s safety net, his backup plan in case things went south.

Which is not to say that he hadn’t been genuinely interested in the ruins. He _had_ spent years reading journals, sketching out every precious photo he could get hold of, of those people from other planets. He had held that unwavering, laser-focused curiosity within himself for as long as he could remember. It was why he was so suited to co-lead the Sokovian mission, why he was able to succeed in rescuing Tony from the caves.

But agreeing to come onboard was always meant to be a side gig. A pause to recover from their losses, to redirect Central’s attention, before he – and Tony – could come back into the fight swinging.

But wasn’t the fight, at its core, about making sure people didn’t suffer, making their lives better? Wasn’t that why he had bulldozed through Central, raising support for law reforms, for the retention of human dignity?

And isn’t that the chance they’ve been given here?

But he’s not going to be fooled into fighting someone else’s war again. For all Thor’s told them already, he _is_ an alien, and he does have his own agenda.

So first: questions.

Thor readily tells them more about Asgard, about his long time spent on earth and his freakish powers. About his young naivety and then his rude awakening into the reign of terror he had a hand in propagating.

Apparently, the statue on Jotunheim was of him.

When Steve learns that – aside from the fact that the greatest alien mystery humanity had encountered just got solved with a simple question - it makes him sit down and re-evaluate again. Thor had a hand in destroying an entire civilization. Millions of innocent people, dead at his hands. Can someone come back from that?

And if they can’t - what about him? His own hands – as he’s increasingly coming to remember in flashes and faint echoes – are stained with blood. SHIELD sent him on their dirtiest missions, the most despicable acts of terror and violence that Pierce thought would bring order to the world.

He knows – he knows that he didn’t have much of a choice. He knows there wasn’t much of _him_ left then to have a choice, really.

But. He still did it. Hundreds of people, dead by his hand.

And the only reason he managed to break the cycle was sheer random chance. A company takeover, a burnt record, a misplaced name. And so Asset R01 slipped through the cracks, letting Steve Rogers fade in from the edges, not even noticing that he had been gone.

If Fury hadn’t gotten suspicious, hadn’t started investigating, hadn’t called Carol up to confirm, the coup wouldn’t have happened and he’d still be unknowing, uncaring, would still be Pierce’s pet slave today. Bucky would still be frozen in SHIELD’s basement, the only subject of their ghastly experiments.

Too much of their lives have been ruled by other people’s choices. The fact he's even here is a miracle.

In the end, he supposes that what matters is not what their worlds made them but who they choose to be today.

* * *

They spend three days, discussing, going round in circles. Thor tells them that he masqueraded as Sam to Hala Control, telling them of a lead the Valkyrie crew wanted to follow up on so that there would be no one out there looking for them; they have plenty of time to decide what to do about the Asgardian threat.

“We could take them,” Tony says at one point, a glint in his eyes.

Wanda frowns. “Would we survive it?”

Thor shakes his head. “You would be crushed in a heartbeat.”

“Well, what do we do?” Jane asks exasperatedly. “We can’t keep on sabotaging deep space missions to prevent humans from travelling beyond the Orvan void. That’s not a long term solution, or one that’s guaranteed to work.”

Thor cocks his head. “You could follow the Skrulls’ example.”

Wanda leans forward. “The Skrulls?”

He gestures carelessly. “Another fairly primitive race like yourselves. We managed to evacuate them before my sister's army reached their planet two thousand years ago. They are still nomads, under my friend’s watch.”

All the humans exchange a look. He’s talking about – another independent alien civilization. One that’s apparently still alive. Still running, from the Asgardians.

Jane cocks her head, academic curiosity temporarily winning out against getting to know more about the active threat. “Where are the Skrulls right now?”

Thor shrugs. “Only Brunnhilde knows, and she’s not supposed to share their location with me in case either of us was compromised.”

Steve grimaces. Running. He’s not really a fan.

“Coming back to the point,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. “I’m definitely not going back home and sitting on my ass knowing this. And Central will lock me away before they listen to me. So I see two options here. Either we take the fight to the Asgardians so they can’t trace us back to Earth.” He holds out a hand to stall Thor’s protest. “ _Or,_ we can start over on this planet. Maybe begin quietly evacuating people to set up a radio-silent colony here. This isn’t a bad place to hide. But the way I see it, each of us has to make this decision on their own. I know trying to go up against them might be a task doomed from the start but I for one won’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t try.”

“You humans don’t understand - ” Thor starts hotly.

“You’ve set up underground networks haven’t you?” Tony cuts in. His eyes are calculating. "You've been working on this for thousands of years."

Sam shoots him a surprised glance, nodding. “Exactly. I think you’ve got the resources in place to really try something, but you’ve spent too long running to realize you could stop. And if we’re wrong - what more could you lose?”

Thor doesn’t reply.

“Are you speaking for all of us, Captain?” Natasha asks after a moment, cocking her head.

Sam takes a breath. “No, each of you is free to make you own decisions. I know this isn’t what you signed up for.”

Steve watches Sam, and remembers him in the desert, standing proud and tall under the blazing sun. He thinks, with sudden certainty, how lucky he’s been to have him as a friend.

* * *

After, Steve and Bucky go for a walk, hiking up one of the rolling hills at the edge of the jungle until they’re above the canopy and staring at the stars. It’s a sunless night, their first on the planet, and without the light of a moon, there’s nothing to dim blazing glory of the millions of constellations spread across the skies.

Beside him, Bucky sits down on a rocky outcropping, craning his head up to look at the sky. He flicks his eyes towards Steve. “Get down here, would you?”

Smiling slightly, Steve obliges, leaning against him so that his head rests on his shoulder.

Bucky takes his hand, and Steve wonders at the simplicity of it. He and Bucky have been reaching towards one another for over forty years. Such a long time, and he can only remember fragments, knowing that the rest is lost – stolen from him by people who used him, used his body and his mind and twisted his soul into things he could have never imagined.

But he’s free now.

They both are.

And here they are, on a planet that is young and fresh and growing , a planet with no wars, no fights, no trickery and deceit. A planet that could serve as a fresh start for both of them.

They could stay here, build a house as the founders of a new colony. Wake up to the remnants of the blazing stars fading away, watch the three suns rise and dance across the skies. Grow old together, with no more stolen years, no more gaps or loss or heartbreak.

Bucky looks at him, and his eyes are hard and blazing, and so, so alive. “So,” he says, his smile heartbreakingly happy, gut wrenchingly sad. “You want us to start over?”

And Steve looks at the constellations spread above them, the blazing glory of the galaxy untarnished by city lights or smoke, and knows that somewhere out there is earth, where billion of humans are suffocating under a tyrannical rule, and somewhere beyond that is a race of aliens running scared, fleeing from star to star without a true home, and somewhere further, in the explosive, radiant center of the galaxy is another race of aliens far older and wiser than humans who have retreated into arrogance and hate and disguised their fear with anger, ready to destroy at the slightest aggravation.

“No,” he says, and meets Bucky’s eyes, and it’s like he falls in love with him all over again, and somewhere that sickly asthmatic boy who never thought he could put down the weight of the world smiles and lifts his head. He is not done yet, and neither is Bucky, however old the world see them as, and they will endure, they will keep on pushing forward, keep on working towards a better world.

There is no starting over. You can only build in the ruins of what you have left.

“No,” he tells Bucky, under the star-filled skies. “We fight.”

* * *

_…_

_Subject: Preliminary findings of exploratory expedition_

_Location: Noer193A, 28.545° N, 77.193° E_

_[Message begins]_

_Planet Noer193A has previously been observed to support macroscopic life forms, though all of them seem to be stationary plant-based variants. On a survey run, ship sensors detected an anomalous rock formation on the northern hemisphere. A small team was sent down to investigate._

_The rock formation appeared to bear script commonly associated with humans (see: Earth). The carving dates to over ten thousand years old. A rough translation is as follows:_

> _This is the beginning_
> 
> _\- The Avengers_

_No other traces of humans have been found on Noer193A._

_[Message ends]_

_…_

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading. I hope you've enjoyed this story as much I liked writing it.  
> Here's to everyone stuck far away from home.


End file.
